What did folks do before mapmyrun.com? I know what I did – got in my car and drove around. When you’re planning marathon training routes that’s a royal pain. Thanks to this site those days are over. Route mapping sites have been around for a couple years. Gmaps is popular and just last year I was using the USA Track & Field site. It was ok, but I did run into a couple of instances where the map was wrong and a street that appeared to cross through was a dead-end. That’s no fun when you’re running.

The best feature of mapmyrun is “Follow the roads.” You used to have to click a lot to follow the streets on the map or just live with the inaccuracies of cutting corners. Creating a 15 mile loop took a long time. Now the software does it for you. Routes also include elevation so you can see where you’re going to suffer most. And unlike USATF it has a full screen mode making it easier to see a wide area. There is some annoying auto-centering, but that’s easily stopped by a click. I would like to see the addition of a drag-and-drop re-routing feature like Google and Yahoo maps have.

I currently rely on mapmyrun for both running and cycling. There’s a separate site called mapmyride that uses the same database so all your maps are in a single list. I even print out the maps and carry them when I’m in an unfamiliar area. I do suspect it won’t last much longer as an independent site. They appear to generate revenue through ads, but there aren’t a lot of ads on the site. My guess is Active.com will gobble it up. I hope it lives on. At least until April.

Last Modified : February 12th, 2008 Filed under : training Navigate : Previous post / Next post