How Far Have I Walked?

After the excesses of Christmas many of us are now thinking about what New Year's resolutions we can make in order to lose a few lbs. Last week I wrote about the new Trail Router interactive map, which can help you generate new running, walking and cycling routes to help keep your exercise regime a little more interesting. 

One very useful feature of Trail Router is that it can generate routes for customized distances. For example if you want to walk five miles every day you can use Trail Router to generate a new 5 mile hiking route each morning.

I have been using Trail Router myself over the last week in order to generate new walking routes around my neighborhood. However I'm not always very good at sticking to a set route. While walking I often find myself diverting from the route suggested by Trail Router in order to explore, pop into a nearby shop, visit an ATM etc. The result is that when I get home from my walk I am often unsure about how far I have actually walked.

When this happens I refer to How Far Did I Run?. How Far Did I Run? is another handy route planning tool which can be used to generate walking, running or cycling routes. I, however, often uses How Far Did I Run? to work out how far I have actually already walked (I don't run!).

If you plot a walk that you have already taken on the How Far Did I Run? interactive map it will tell you the distance that you completed. The map comes with three handy 'snap-to' tools which will snap the drawn route to the nearest path, cycle path or road. This is very handy for quickly drawing a route that you have walked or cycled as the map snaps the route to follow the paths or roads that you are likely to have actually used (if the map won't snap to the route that you took you can switch to a more free-hand tool).

How Far Did I Run? is therefore a very useful tool for quickly working out how far you actually jogged, walked or cycled once you return from your daily exercise.