Running Route Planning – Why It Is Important

One of the best ways of achieving healthy weight loss and increasing levels of fitness is to start running. Running is a great way of burning off calories because, unlike cycling or swimming where your body weight is supported, it forces you to carry your body around with you, so you get a free weight session as well as improving your cardiovascular fitness. The flipside of jogging is that it is a higher impact activity.

There are several ways to mitigate against injury when doing high intensity exercise such as running. You can make sure you have the correct type of footwear. You can also spend a few months, preferably with a coach, correcting any problems with your running form. But one excellent way to ward off overuse injuries is to make sure you plan several different running routes.

For people who run three or four times a week, it is a great idea to do different types of workout. A long slow run is the one where you improve your endurance skills. You might also want to do some speedwork on flat surfaces, or improve your strength by doing hill repeats. It is also important to mix up your running surfaces between concrete paths, grass and perhaps even fit in some track sessions. These all mean you will spread your efforts across multiple muscles, and reduce the repetitive motions which can cause you to damage your joints.

So planning running routes has many practical advantages – as well as allowing you to keep your sessions interesting. A useful website for finding nice local routes, or even planning your own, is called MapMyRun (www.mapmyrun.com). The site allows you to choose a map of anywhere in the world, and look at the streetplan or satellite image. The best option is the hybrid view where you get to see the satellite view with an overlay of the street names. If you want to create your own running route, simply click on the map to position your start point, and then keep clicking to “draw” your route. It only works in straight lines, so you have to build up the route rather than simply clicking your start and end points – it will not know which route you want to take in any case!

As you create a new circuit, the site will show you in miles or kilometers how far it is, so you can play with it to design a training plan for a 5K or 10K race perhaps. If you click on the Elevation button at the bottom, you can also see how hilly your new route is and then decide whether you still want to run it!

Using MapMyRun or other programs will not only help you prevent injuries and keep things interesting, but it is also a very good idea for female runners to switch their routes around to be as unpredictable as possible. This will keep you safe from undesirable people who might be trying to learn your route so they can harm you.