As of last night I recorded 1,457 different running activities in the app I use to track my fitness. There’s nothing special about that number except to make the points that (a) it’s quite a lot and (b) when you stack all those individual activities, in particular the GPS maps they generate, on top of each other (which there is a feature to do) you get what they call a heat map, an orange on black map of cumulative routes tracked.
Places you run a lot glow bright orange with dozens or hundreds of track lines.
Places you run occasionally are dimmer with one or two lines.
Places you’ve never run are just empty black streets.
I was surprised to notice recently that even after nearly fifteen hundred activities there are streets near me, in my neighbourhood, even just a few blocks away which I’ve never run down. Ever.
My goal for the next while is to try and run at least once per week down a road which I currently have no track… to fill in the running gaps on my heat map.