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| Screenshot of StatsHunters generated heat map. |
I’ve hit a few speed bumps that have delayed my progress with my run every street project. The first and worst of those speed bumps was an injury to my calf (you can read about it in this blog post) at the end of March. After what felt like a long recovery period, the injury seems to have healed and I decided to get back to making some progress on my run every street project of Egg Harbor Township, NJ just last weekend. While recovering, I avoided going more than a mile or two away from home just in case the injury flared up and I had to hobble home. So running farther away from home to continue this project was a bit of a big step in my recovery.
I decided to re-run a grouping of streets I had run once before, but for some reason the data didn’t sync to CityStrides (the mapping tool I’ve been using to track my progress). Introducing speed bump #2: tech tool issues. I didn’t mind rerunning a few streets due to a technology issue, but after the second time of running them and having them not sync I started looking into alternative tools.
Jonathanokeefe.com
This tool will create a heat map of your strava activities. You can specify activity types and the date range of activities you want a map of. It’s a really cool tool, but it lacks the really useful features for a run every street project that CityStriders offers: percentage of streets completed and node finder which can be used to pinpoint streets that have not been completed. There is a “new” option to download a KML file of the created map, but thus far I have gotten an error message everytime I tried to use that option.
StatsHunters
Another really cool tool that will create a heat map of your Strava activities and provides a plethora of statistics from all of your Strava data and loads of ways to filter your activites. The statistics are cool to look over and I like the heat map better than the jonathanokeeffe map, but this site has the same drawbacks in regard to missing the really useful features for a run every street project that CityStriders offers.
Street Ferret
This tool seems to be the best choice in my experience for a run every street project. It provides all the necessary tools to make the tracking of a run every street project effortless and make planning easier. It quickly synced all of my Strava data in a matter of minutes; CityStriders took nearly a month to complete the initial sync. I didn’t use Streetferret for as long as CityStriders, but for the week I did use it all of my runs synced quickly and consistently. This is in contrast to CityStriders which I have had syncing issues with. With CityStriders, usually it is just a 1-2 day delay, but there have been several periods when runs just don’t sync at all. Of all the tools covered here, Streetferret is the only one that is not free. It offers a free one week trial, but after that it charges a fee of $4 per month.
With the injury and tech issues, my run every street project has not shown any progress since the end of March. It’s kind of a bummer for me, but I’m reevaluating and then will be back at it. At this point, I think my plan is to print out a large EHT road map and highlight all the roads I have run so far and update the map as I make progress. Yes, it is more labor intensive, but I also feel it is more dependable than software mapping options I have used so far. Once I am pretty confident that I am near 100% complete, I plan to pay for a month of Streetferret to get my percentage complete and determine where/which streets I still need to complete.
If there are any tools that I failed to mention here, I would love to hear about them and give them a test run. Thus far, Streetferret is by far the most useful dependable tool I’ve found for a run every street project, I’m just not willing to pay the monthly fee for the service while this is a long term project for me. Once I know that I’m within a month or two of finishing, I’ll be happy to drop that 4 bucks a month.
