Running is great. If you’re like me, there’s no better way to start the day off than a few miles to get the blood flowing. Recently, I’ve had the luxury of running in Monmouth County, NJ’s Dorbrook Recreation Area.
Dorbrook is only one of the many paths I’ve run over the past few years. I enjoy getting creative. At Princeton, I would often run paths around various dorm buildings down towards Lake Carnegie. I’ve found that the best tool for planning these creative routes is Google Earth.
Using Google Earth’s ruler function, you can simply draw out your route in the application, and it calculates the total distance. Here’s a walkthrough of how I calculated the distance of one lap around Dorbrook:
1. In the main Google Earth application window, navigate to your desired running location. From there, select Tools -> Ruler.
2. Once the Ruler pane has opened, make sure you change the tab selected from Line to Path. You will see that you have the option of viewing the distance in one of many different units.
3. Finally, trace out the path (one straight line at a time) until you have completed your route. The Ruler pane will tell you exactly how long your run will be.
This tool is especially useful if you plan to run off-road. Entering in two addresses can help you determine the length of paths defined by roads, but this doesn’t work off-road. The Ruler is the only way to properly determine the total distance using Google Earth. Best of all, it helps you stay consistent with your distances while adding variation to your runs.
Let me know if you have any other creative uses of the Google Earth application.
