Mapping

Because I have not yet joined the 21st century when it comes to running technology and don't have a GPS watch or a GPS running app on my iPhone, if I want to know how far I've gone on a run I have to go old school and map it out online. I had been using the USA Track and Field site, but it's very labor intensive. You have to zoom way in and manually map the route, eyeballing it. A friend told me about gmap pedometer, which automatically follows walking/running paths. It is much faster and easier to map a run. But...I think it overestimates distances. I noticed this summer when I first started using it that a run I mapped at about 8.5 miles on the USATF site was about 9.5 miles on gmap. The straight-line calculations the USATF site uses would make routes map out shorter than they really are, but by a whole mile on an 8-9 mile route?

The last couple of runs I have done, if gmap is to be believed, I have run at a blistering (for me) pace. Today I ran a 3.9 mile route in 30 minutes, a 7:45 pace. I know I've dropped my pace by quite a bit over the past year with some changes to my stride and form, plus just a lot of running. And I was running faster than usual. This was the shortest run I've done in a long time and I was kind of in a hurry to finish it, get home and get on with my day. I hit a trail crossing that I usually pass at about 15:00 to 15:30 at 14:15. But I have a really hard time believing I ran a 7:45 pace.

Now I'm tempted to get the Nike+GPS iPhone app and see how it compares. But then I would need to carry my iPhone on runs. Running is about the only time my iPhone isn't within arms reach.

I'm not even really sure why it matters to me. All I can come up with is that running sub-8 minute miles on a training run might do what running two marathons, two half marathons, countless other races and 1000s of training miles haven't: make me consider myself a runner.