Today I went for a quick ride at Graham Hills Park in Pleasantville. I made sure to finally track my route using iTrail, a GPS app for the iPhone.
I wanted to give this a try after seeing the map of Graham Hills that some WMBA members created via GPS. I was curious as to just how much of the park I had explored.
When my ride was over I checked iTrail and was able to post a little map of my ride at Graham to twitpic. Just by the ratio of blue lines and the area of green I could tell that I haven’t been seeing that much of the park. This explains the other day when I saw tons of cars in the parking lot but only ran into 2 people during my ride.
When I got home I looked over the export options in iTrail. One of the options was an app named TrailRunner, so I decided to give it a try.
It’s free but I’m already impressed enough that I made a donation to the developer. It has a neat little function that allows you to play back your route and you can step through it point by point as well. You can also split up your route into different sections. It also has diary and exercise tools but I’ve yet to look into those.
iTrail can also export to TrailMapping.com, so I signed up for that site as well. So far the site doesn’t seem to have much functionality beyond posting a “trip” and letting people comment on it.
Later in the evening I saw a twitter update from my friend Seth about DailyMile.com. This looks more like a site for road cyclist (and swimmers and runners) but I signed up anyways. It’s for tracking where you rode, how far, how long and how you felt during the ride. Other users can cheer you on and comment on your “workout”. You can also share photos and videos of your ride via the site. I even started a Mountain Biking group on DailyMile just to see if there are other mountain bikers on the site. Some of the discussions in forums seem to suggest so.
It’s pretty amazing that there are so many apps and web sites for these kinds of activities. There are a few others that I have tried but I’m waiting to see if I naturally use them – that lets me know if they really are good.
