16-January-2020 By Jeffrey Cooper
Becoming A Runner
In a previous article on Quantified Self, I gave a brief overview of how I learned to run, partly out of adversity due to a bad cycling injury. To elaborate just a bit on that- it was 2004, and mobile apps were barely around, and mainly on a few Symbian handsets, or Blackberries. Phones didn’t have GPS or didn’t have reliable GPS. I was on my own.
To recover from my injury, I was running a high school track in the evenings near my house in Dallas. I could run maybe 1/2 mile before I needed to walk, so I would walk 1/4 mile. Then I would run 1/4 mile, walk, run, maybe up to a mile total of running. Then I would run and walk in 1/8 mile increments. The beauty of a track is that it’s easy to measure as little as 1/8 mile reliably.
I found that, quite easily, I could run 1/8 and walk 1/8 just about forever. So I did it for a while to accumulate several miles of running. After a week or so, I noticed that somewhere in the repetition of 1/8-1/8 intervals, suddenly, I had a bit more energy and could again run 1/4 mile. Slowly, over time, 1/8’s grouped into 1/4’s, and then 1/2’s. Within a month or so I was running multiple miles continuously for the first time in my life! As my arm had healed by then, I graduated from the track to the streets.
These days, there are apps for every type of athlete. I recommend Couch To 5k (C25k), which uses the intervals method to get you running scratch to 5k in 30 days.
In the following year, my distances went up, and one day a really great song came on my iPod (it was 2005, after all) right at 5 miles, and I decided to keep running. That day I made 7. I was ecstatic!
Enter GPS
In late 2005, I got my first wearable. It was a Garmin Forerunner 310. That changed everything. By that time I was doing pretty well with my running and logging it via Excel, tracking just distance and calories burned, and had even run my first longer race- an 8-mile Turkey Trot in Dallas.
When GPS came into the picture, not only was distance measured more accurately (my previous distance estimates turned out to be a bit generous), but you could export the runs and see them on a map. In the early days, I used an app from Zone 5 Software that would plot the runs, and overlay them. Suddenly I was in heaven! I could visually see all my runs at once. From that point onward, I ran a different route every time I ran, so I could fill in all the roads.
Alas, a few years into that, there was some software issue and I lost the original traces. I didn’t know where Zone 5 stored them, so couldn’t back them up.
Fast Forward
Despite the loss, I kept running with GPS from thenceforth. In 2011, I graduated to mobile app tracking and ditched the Garmin. First it was SportsTracker, and then MapMyRun. A few years ago, I figured out how to carefully export the GPS files, now in a GPX format, and overlay them on Google Earth.
That was a bit of trial and error. At least at the time, Strava and some other apps didn’t create a unique name in XML for each GPX file, and dragging a new one onto the map would make the previous one disappear. I eventually figured out the problem and MayMyRun both had unique naming and was a smaller file size, since they included less overall data, leaving out elevation data. I’ve continued to use MapMyRun for GPS tracks ever since.
I have been hooked ever since. It’s a form of gamification, a subject we’ll come back to. Gamification can take several forms- competition with others (winning the game) or competition against yourself. Generally I do the latter. My goal is to always run new roads and trails on every run, until I run out within a reasonable distance. It makes a game out of it.
In 2013, we left Dallas and moved to Santa Cruz, CA. I set out exploring my town and the country around me. That, along with techniques, will be the subject of an article in the near future.