Running Chick

I have one of those fancy "smart" phones that has a built-in gps.  Today as I was trying to plan out a route for my six-mile run, I thought that it would be cool if I could find a fancy program for said phone which could record the data from my route and display it in a map real-time.  This would make it easier for Josh to keep tabs on my progress for the times when he needs to come and pick me up.

The first application I tried was GPSed.  It seemed to work okay while I was doing some preliminary testing at my house. Well, it was able to correctly pinpoint my location of my phone as it sat on the desk next to the computer.  But, it completely failed beyond that.  Here's what Josh saw as I was on my run:

This is what it should have looked like

Only a slight difference. Josh reported that the route, which was set to upload every 3 minutes, was sometimes uploaded and sometimes not.  In all, I wasn't very impressed with GPSed.  Realizing that it was just released on Friday, perhaps they'll fix the obvious bugs in the next release.  If not, I'm totally asking for my 99 cents back.

The next application I tried was called InstaMapper.  It's not like I was going to head out on another run to test it, so I decided to give a spin on my way to the grocery store.

Here's the to-route.  

Both the to- and from-routes.

The data version of the route.

So much better.  Josh said that the points were uploaded quickly and most importantly, they were very accurate.

We'll test in further when I'm on my run tomorrow to see how accurate it is while my phone is riding around in my pocket.

Oh, almost forgot.  Today's six-miler was at a 10:47 pace, which was pretty speedy considering the majority of my run was on pure ice.  The only time I was worried was when I was heading down Manninen Road and noticed that I was cruising at a very fast 9:10 pace and I had this vision of myself falling and sliding ala one-person luge all the way down the hill into cross traffic.  I probably could have (maybe should have) slowed down, but the thought of running for any length of time at that pace was way too empowering.  Thanks to my trusty YakTraks, I avoided any winter olympic action.

This week's totals:  11.02 miles @ 10:51 average pace/minute.