Spring is in the air! It’s about time. If you’re like me, you’ve been anxious to get out and start running or biking. Even just being able to take a walk in the great outdoors at a comfortable temperature is appreciated. If you’re a curious George, you might like to know how far you’ve traveled. A mash-up with Google Maps, Gmaps Pedometer adds a route tracking tool.
Along with plotting your course, you can calculate distance, calories, and elevation. With a simple interface on the left side of your map, you can just turn these features on or off.
Enter your location at the top and what zoom level you want, and then hit the Go button. After you zoom in and pan to your location, you can click the Start Recording… button. Just double-click on the map where you’d like to begin your route. This will start your route with a red tag. Then just double-click on the map again at the next point of your route; for example, where you turn. Try to be as accurate as possible and plot out your route. As you add more legs to your route, the distance shown on the left and elevation at the bottom will change accordingly.
I’ve been using Gmaps Pedometer for a few years now. It’s much more accurate than the normal pedometers you wear that shake and it can help make a route for you in a new area or if construction is making your previous route unavailable. It’s also great if you just go out for a run and later want to know how much distance you covered. A new feature is the automatic routing. You can have a route that as you click, automatically follows roads for running and street rules (like One-Way) for biking. You can still switch to manual to not use this feature. From the screenshot above, you can see that’s what I had to do to measure how far a lap around a park would be.
Check out Gmaps Pedometer and happy trails!