Higdon inspires new Net tool: Route Ruler
The Net is incredible. (Oh, yeah, you noticed.) Has stuff online you never knew you’d need. Latest example is the “Route Ruler” by a team led by Alex Sumberg, a 32-year-old runner. The site is slick. Shows evidence of great thought. Haven’t tried it. (And I rarely run roads.) But since I know many of y’all do, I mention it as an FYI. Alex devised the site after using a Hal Higdon marathon training program. See, us geezers do good in mysterious ways.
Alex writes:
I am a runner in San Francisco that was frustrated by trying to determine exact route distances. I found driving them to be tedious, time consuming, and less than accurate, especially when I wanted to run on trails, through parks, and down one-way streets where cars cannot go.
So, I got together with another runner-friend of mine and created a FREE online application called Route Ruler, which allows athletes to draw their own routes on downloaded maps and gives them exact distances. As far as we know this is the only free service of its kind, and it eliminates the need for buying costly GPS gadgets.
We are still fine-tuning some of the features and look of the site, but we do have a website up at www.routeruler.com, and want you to take a look at it. We feel it could turn out to be a great training tool for some of your subscribers.
Since you are the experts, we wanted to see if you would send us any comments you might have. If you like it, please feel free to tell your subscribers, we feel it could prove a useful training tool for them. Also please feel free to post a link to our site. We will be constantly improving the look and usability of Route Ruler through the coming months.
I hope you like it, and I look forward to any comments you may send.
Yours,
Alex Sumberg
Route Ruler
Know Before You Go
Me again:
Alex says he’s training for his first marathon — the San Francisco Marathon. He’s using a training program by longtime masters distance ace and writer Hal Higdon, whose work inspired him to devise the “RR.” He says he “ran into another guy who had the same idea and a programming background. My background is in political consulting. We have been working together on the idea for about 2 months now.”
One Response
Just wanted to mention that the Route Ruler site works with all kinds of maps, so you trail runners may for the first time have an easy way to get accurate distances fo your off-trail routes. As long as the map has a scale in is in a usabel format you can use it–Topo, trail maps, even nauticall charts all work.
Alex Sumberg
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