Route Mapping

In recent times our fitness regime has had to change to accommodate a raft of annoying injuries. Running is not an option when you have a badly torn calf muscle, or a wobbly ankle, or damaged ligaments in your big toe. Bizarrely, only one of these injuries was incurred during a run. The others were accrued stumbling down the stairs or even, on one particularly notable occasion, tripping over what under closer examination turned out to be thin air.

But prior to our descent to crippled wreckary, we used to map our runs using a website that drew the route as a red line over a high resolution map. From this we could deduce how far we had run, roughly how many calories we had burned, and just how steep that long slog up the hill to the park is (incidentally, not nearly as steep as it felt running up it). The resulting routes normally appeared as seemingly random squiggles, or at best very badly drawn circles. I'm rather disappointed in them having seen the following story on the BBC's site:

David Taylor, a cyclist from Wiltshire, has used a similar app to map his routes, but instead of random squiggles or badly drawn circles, he creates actual pictures. He even managed to draw a bicycle by travelling a very convuluted journey around the New Forest. He had to cycle 187 miles to complete it though, so perhaps we'll leave him to it.

Besides, our new fitness regime revolves around the rowing machine in the garage. However hard we row, our routes now would just be one slightly embarrassed blob to the left of our house.

K.