What are people using to plan their routes as ... - Couch to 5K
What are people using to plan their routes as they run for longer? I'm doing wk5R3 on Monday and am starting to think more about my route.
I don't have an android phone or fancy watch (yet!) so I've been using Google Maps to check out local routes. stayinbed told me about a useful feature that allows you to plot a route, which she explains how to use here: couchto5k.healthunlocked.co... There are various dedicated sites for running that allow you to plot routes, such as walkjogrun, but I haven't found one that works for me yet.
The other non-techy thing that I do is just go out and run (or walk) somewhere that looks interesting. When you've got a set number of minutes to run then you probably want to check it out first, but exploring can be fun in itself. 
I don't have a circular route. I run along a canal tow path so I just go till I'm halfway through the time and then turn around and run back.
hi i'm also in W5 and have started using this gmap-pedometer.com ..seems to be quite good for what i need
geodistance.com/ is good too, even for techophobes like me! Just put your address in top right and click where you want to go. Miles or km, map or satellite, you can choose.
I used goodrunguide (free for all to map routes though £10 a year if you want to join up) . I would "remember" a run and then map it when I got home to see what distance/gradients etc I had covered. Downside was that I could not always remember where I had run when "in the zone"! Also good for planning routes. Have a garmin now which has replaced need to measure routes ...
i used to run along a route that was circular and takes about 50 min to walk all the way through. it was great motivation as the weeks went on that I had less and less to walk to get home after the cool down walk had finished. the total legnth was 4.2 k and it felt great when i had to extend it as i got further on in the program!
I never got the 5k in 30 min though- still working on that one - ive only ran the full 5 k once and it took 35.31.
I worked out the distance using an online site that you can enlarge the map and click on set points to work out the distance. i cant remember what it was called though, sorry
I don't have fancy gadgets either but I use mapometer.com which uses Google maps. You can save and edit routes and also keep a log of all your training runs. It really suits me well
Thanks everyone. Great tips for me to try and see which ne works for me. Happy running
We've got too many hills round here and I'm not ready for those yet so head off to the aerodrome and just run when I'm told to and walk when I'm told to, then walk back from wherever I get to.
I'm thinking of buying the new (and supposedly very simple) Garmen when it comes out later this month.
sites.garmin.com/forerunner10/
This is maybe a silly question, but do these trackers work properly no matter where you are - in the woods, on country paths etc?
They are good but aren't brilliant, I use a tracker on my iphone and my garmin watch together, and they seem to take it in turns to be the one that loses connection at some point
The longer you run, the better it is as the average will usually be correct, but the fastest pace record is pretty always wrong for me.
They are better than guessing though! My run is on roads but ones that have quite a lot of tree cover. I'm sure they would be fine in more open country.
Thank you trooperlooper! At the moment I'm just using geodistance.com which is quite good but a lot of the woodland tracks aren't marked. This new garmin isn't very expensive so it might be what I'm looking for.
The gar min's look pretty good on the website. Might get one once I'm up to 5k. Thanks for your comments everyone.
I use mapmyrun.com - you can plot in advance to make sure the run is long/short enough and you can also record the run you're doing to get your pace stats at the end. It has a live option, which i thought would help my husband keep an eye on me as some of the places i run are quite remote, but actually he's usually fast asleep when I'm running so its a redundant feature lol
What I really like on mapmyrun is that you can see the gradients you're going to have to get to grips with... and choose according to how strong you feel!
gmap-pedometer.com/ to plan the route and an Android app to record my times and distance.
