Bored of Your Running Route?

Back when I was training for the NYC marathon in 2010, there came a time when the thought of yet another lap of Prospect Park was almost too much for me to bear. I had used my GPS watch to come up with new twists and turns through the park, so I wasn’t always just on the loop, but faced with an 18 or 20 mile long run, there were only so many variations on a theme.

Route Recommender tool on mapmyrun.com

Enter online mapping tools! If you’re really tired of your same old running route but you need to get a certain mileage done for a long run, it’s an easy way of planning a run without worrying about how far you’re really running. I ended up doing a great out-and-back 20 mile run from my home, through Brooklyn, across the Brooklyn Bridge and along the West Side Highway. It was really fun to run from one borough to another and back again and great for a change. There are a lot of different free mapping tools online for runners, bikers and walkers – you should definitely check one out for a fresh running route.

One of the more well-known calculators is Map My Run. To find a mapped route generated by a Map My Run user, you go to Find a Route and enter the area you’re looking to run and desired mileage. This is dependent on users uploading a course, though. For $50 a year, you can join their MVP program, which allows you to use the Route Recommender. You enter a starting address, or general area, along with your desired mileage and it automatically generates a mapped run. Keep clicking on Recommend a New Route and it will keep generating new loops still within the same area. If you travel a lot for work (or fun!) this might be worth the annual fee alone. Mapping your own course is pretty easy – you can select customizable options like auto-following roads, or avoiding major highways. You can easily map with one click an out-and-back run, once you have the first leg mapped. A similar website is Run My Route, which offers the same function of following roads automatically, as well as out-and-back mapping.

A website I used before discovering Map My Run is Favorite Run, which is nowhere near as slick as most route calculators. One aspect I don’t like about it is there is no way to automatically follow roads. So, if for example, you’re mapping a simple loop of a park, you have to click in tiny increments in order to follow every curve of the road. If you just click ahead on a road, it will do the shortest point from A to B. I can’t believe I used to sit there and click, click, click.  Walk Jog Run has the same issue – I can’t find a way to follow roads. Something I do like about Walk Jog Run is that when you zoom in to wherever you’re looking for a running route, it has icons to click to easily pull up other users’ routes already mapped in that area, so for finding a route in an unfamiliar area without having to do the mapping yourself, it would work well.

If you already have a GPS watch (or are thinking about getting one), they usually come with a route mapping website you can access. Check out a post I wrote on GPS watch comparisons to read about the online route calculators used for Garmin, Timex, Polar and Nike. Most of these websites can also be accessed if you don’t own a GPS device. I use a Garmin, which has Garmin Connect. I love it, but you need a Garmin watch to utilize the mapping tools. Likewise, Polar Personal Trainer is only accessible if you have a Polar product. Training Peaks, the website used by Timex, is a great site with a lot of options for runners (and cyclists and walkers). You can use it to upload routes from several different GPS devices, or you can just use it to map runs, find routes, or use as a free training log. Training Peaks also offers training plans (especially designed for specific races) for sale on its site.

If you don’t need or want a GPS watch, I’d highly recommend sticking to Map My Run or Run My Route, since these are the most user-friendly of the mapping websites I know. The extra cost to become a premium member is worth it only if you want to take advantage of the easy-to-use run generator.

What do you use for mapping your running routes, or finding new courses? Are there any awesome, free websites I’ve overlooked?