My running map

As you probably noticed the widgets with my weekly exercises got a fresh look over the last few weeks. That's because I kinda revived my Let's create a sporting website idea. This is probably a good topic for another post. But it's not what I wanted to talk about it here. Although it's related.

Well, the thing is that what gave me the impulse to revive this idea (two months ago or so) was, well, another idea. I wanted to create a map of my runs. All my runs. Firstly I thought it would be cool to have that. Secondly, it was also a practical consideration: I'm now quite advanced into exploring all the fun places to run in the Bay Area and without such a map it is getting increasingly difficult to keep track of where I was and where I still need to go. So I was very enthusiastic about making it.

Gladly, before jumping head first into implementing it, I did a little research and... realized it's been done. Good folks at raceshape.com did exactly that, by interfacing with Strava. Moreover they did it very well. Often using such products I have some ideas of my own on how I would do this and that differently but in this case this is pretty much exactly what I was looking for and I'm sure I wouldn't be able to do it any better.

So from now on in the top bar of my blog you'll see this link Running map, which will take you to the map. You'll probably want to zoom in into northern California (or Amsterdam or Warsaw perhaps) if you want to see some data. By the way it's quite amazing how humbly it looks. Even if you zoom in on the Bay Area (around San Francisco), where I live and did quite a bit of running you'll just see few splashes of blue here and there. I mean, come on, if you've been following this blog you know that I own this place :P. No, seriously, I've been running here quite a bit and with the explicit goal of exploring new places and a few patches of blue is all I get? Oh well. At least if you switch from terrain to map mode and zoom around Montain View then you can see that most of the state parks around I already checked off my list. More to come!

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