Friday, April 24, 2009

mapping runs

I am sure you've already heard of this since Laura was bored when I excitedly told her and even my mother knew about this. Ok, so in all fairness, my mom is not your typical mom - she rides hundreds of miles a week on her bike (note to self: get handlebar streamers for mother's day), but still, it's the whole, "Aw man, MOM knew about this?!"

ANYWAY, have you heard of mapmyrun.com? Try it out - it's fascinating. And if you go to the hybrid view, you can map trails and things that just clocking on my odometer can't pick up. I've been using it for about a month now and I've been making up all new routes, rather than stick with tried and true. Except that now I make sure the route is burned into my brain so as not to forget which way I am supposed to go instead of running around strange neighborhoods at 7 am desperately thinking, "Argh! I need to get home and make oatmeal for my kids! Where am I?!" (lucky for me, my keen powers of observation noted several cars appearing to be on their way to work - at least that's what I was banking on - and so I went in their direction. Wise move, since the street I would have otherwise turned down would have made me loop endlessly in woe)

One eerie thing - the first time I logged in, it new EXACTLY where I was. Now I know these tubes and wires known affectionately as the world wide web can pinpoint your location, but in actuality, it's a little spooky. It automatically calculated my mom's location here from her laptop. That she brought from California. Laura is probably still bored. And my mom probably already knows all the technology behind it. But I'm impressed. And that's what matters to me.

3 comments:

laura said...

Ha! I actually didn't know it could do that - I figured I had put in my address at some point, and I've never logged in from anywhere else. But yes, isn't it fun making new routes? And it's so satisfying seeing the miles rack up.

Christina said...

I love that site! I used it when I was training for my half marathons... so great! Plus it made the runs more fun because I could make a fun little route and think about that when I wanted to stop running!!!

Alice said...

I also like this site because you can log your runs and choose courses and it'll keep track of your times:)

http://www.runningahead.com/