Training Widget

Thursday, September 20, 2007

How I know how far I run

Day 14 - September 20, 2007

Ask 5 different people how they measure how far they run, and you are likely to get 5 different answers. The worst answer I've heard is the infamous "by how long it takes me". Very few people have the internal pedometer and cruise control to maintain a consistent pace from day to day. When I first started running, I would drive the course that I had run, and measure with the car's odometer. This works well, as long as you always run on the road and one way streets don't interfere. Of course this fails the first time you go for a trail run. A few years ago, I received one of those GPS tracking watches. It was one of the first generation, but worked very well. The downside to the GPS was that heavy tree canopies and cloudy skies could cause the watch to lose contact with the satellites. There also was a lot of variability - if I ran the same run 3 days in a row - it might vary by as much as a tenth of a mile each day. This is close enough for me, especially if I averaged the run over time to get a consistent distance.

I recently found a free website that allows you to track the distance of your run using a tool based on Google Maps. http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/ is a simple tracing program...simply zoom to the location where your run is starting, click record, and then drop some waypoints along the course. The program automatically records the distance of each waypoint and the total distance. You can even save your course to use again or share with others.


Today's run was another recovery day - just a few hills to make it interesting. Hopefully will try and push a little harder tomorrow. But hey - 2 weeks completed!

Chris
Day: 14 ....Time/Date: 6:10AM 9/20/2007 ....Weather:Clear, 52F
Run: Carnation-Goldenrod ....Miles: 3.8 .....Time: 29:24 .....Pace: 7:44 min/mile
Miles to Date: 48.3..... Total Running Time: 6:08:33 .....Weight: 175

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