So I haven’t been updating this blog much, but I’ll begin again soon once I’m less busy. My update for today is that I’ve begun carrying my iPhone with me during runs. Not to listen to music, but for mapping my routes using the builtin GPS. I’ve tried iMapMyRun and RunKeeper so far. Both have free and paid versions for the iPhone. (I’m carrying the iPhone in my hand, which isn’t exactly the greatest solution compared to having it attached to my arm). I had used mapmyride (same company and website) before to look for bike rides in the area. It used to be really nice for biking because you could look for routes or create your own and then print out the maps with turn cue sheets. It worked great. However, it has now gotten quite commercial and lost a lot of the initial ease of use and charm that the original site had. It has, though, grown into a much larger fitness community. Many of the good features now are only available with a monthly subscription. And the free version includes a ton of advertising. RunKeeper looks much simplier, but is just as powerful. It doesn’t yet have cue sheets (most likely because it started off just for running). On the activities page you get a google maps view of the route; below that you get a graph showing a overlay of how speed varied with elevation over the course of the route. And below that there is a section for notes and mileage splits with elevation gained or lost. Both apps allow “live” tweets during the run, however only imapmyrun allows you to customize these tweets from within the app. RunKeeper will tweet automatically for you but you cannot yet add your own comments or include the pace. It does, though, provide a shortened URL link to your RunKeeper public profile (see below), which displays the route and other info that you choose to make public.

Link to MapMyRun route.

Link to RunKeeper route.

I think I’m going to stay with RunKeeper because of how well the app works and because of the simplicity of the website.