London marathon - live on the net

In April, I saw the London marathon (more precisely, a tiny part of it) live on the Internet. The quality wasn't really anything to wax eloquent about. Nonetheless, for a runner deprived of live TV coverage, it was a blessing, especially given the field. At least, you could hear the commentary clearly.

It would be interesting to see if we could leverage the power of technology even further. Imagine a marathon (or any other race) website streaming the live coverage along with a list of the top N runners at any given time. You click on any name and it displays the current data for the runner - current heart rate, current pace, average pace, and other interesting statistics. Given the plethora of personal monitoring devices (e.g., heart rate monitors, etc.) that exists today and the availability of wireless networks, the task in itself shouldn't be too complicated. Of course, it would be up to the runner whether he/she chooses to have that data streamed. On the other hand, if everyone or even half of a field in one of the big ones such as London or Los Angeles decided to go for this, it could pose some interesting scalability problems for wireless delivery.

Recycling old shoes

Last week, I collected a bunch of old shoes from colleagues at work for recycling. All I had to do was send out a company-wide email and put up a large bin in an accessible area. The shoes came flying in. I'll be dropping them off today at a nearby running store that I'd contacted before embarking on this drive.

I learned something in the process. Most of us don't recycle shoes since we don't know that it can be done. Instead, we just put them in the garbage and ultimately it ends up in a landfill somewhere. However, if more of us knew about recycling, more of us would be willing to do so. One of the questions many of them had was: what happens to recycled shoes? I must admit, I didn't know much other than that they were broken down to be used for playground surfacing. I looked it up online and it's a bit more exciting than that. They actually break the shoes into their constituents such as fabric, foam, and rubber. These are then ground up into tiny bits which then go into the surfacing of playgrounds, soccer, football, and baseball fields, athletic tracks, padding under the floors of basketball/volleyball courts, weight room flooring, etc.

So, if you want to do something similar, it's very easy. Simply contact your local running store and see if they recycle shoes. Most would. Keep in mind they only recycle sports shoes. No dress shoes, no hiking boots, no thongs, no sandals. You could then contact your neighbors or work colleagues and tell them about your sole intention. Most people are very willing to cooperate and would be more than happy to get rid of their old shoes sitting in the garage/attic/backyard, if they know that their shoes are going towards a worthy cause. Go for it!

gmap-pedometer.com to map running routes

Check out http://www.gmap-pedometer.com. It's a google maps hack that lets you calculate the distance of your running route. You click "start recording" and simply double click on each point that you want and proceed to the next one on your intended route. The cumulative distance is shown so you know how far you would've run. This is a very useful tool for runners who would rather not have to measure their route in a car or wear a GPS unit.

Just out of curiosity, I compared it to ask.com's maps feature that I wrote about in my last post. For a specific route, I calculated the distance using both these methods. What do I get? Exactly the same distance. I think they differed in the second or third decimal point but that could be attributed to where I placed my points on the maps. This one was slightly faster than ask.com, but it's not exactly a fair comparison since this is a utility that was built on gmaps. It could have as well been built on ask.com. Overall, I think it's very good.

maps at ask.com makes it easy to map running routes

ask.com unveiled its new interface this week. I played around with the maps feature and found it to be immensely better than any of the current offerings out there. You can put in a start point and add as many destinations as you want. But, that's not the best part. The most compelling feature, in my opinion, was the ability to drag and drop the pins that represent the destinations. You can drop it anywhere on the map and it will automatically calculate the new coordinates for you.

This is exactly what I'd been wanting for a long time. In the past, when I would want to map out a route using web-based maps, I had to put in the street intersections for pairs of starting and ending points and do that for all the segments that made up my intended route and finally add up all the distances to get my final mileage. Needless to say, it was a tedious task that required quite a bit of time. This makes it really easy. Very impressive.

I don't expect it will be as accurate (down to the decimal) as using a bike odometer. Nevertheless, it could be a good tool to get a general idea of how long a route is.

Off to find a few new routes to go running.

Welcome

This is where I'll blog my running activities as I run through the race called life. Stay tuned.