Philip Miller, of Dallas, Texas, never felt quite satisfied with his runner tracking. He tried it all. MapMyRun, Strava, RunKeeper – but still, he wanted something more than pace and calories.
Even his trusty Garmin watch, which tells runners pace, splits, milage and even hooks up to a heart rate monitor, didn’t cut it. “I was frustrated because it doesn’t re-scale the y-axis on your pace versus distance graph.”
Wait, wait, wait Philip, you’ve lost us — the what?
Lucky for the long-time curious runner, Miller is a bit of a science technology nerd with a knack for graphs.
“I like science and graph data and running is my passion,” Miller jokes. “You put all of that that stuff together and you get GraphMyRun.”
Rather than go into the science of what Miller made with his website GraphMyRun, let’s look at what it can do. Miller has taken practically every piece of data that you might get out on your run and cobbled together some basic software and an extensive graphing library to let you find out incredibly intricate details.
Most runner tracking tools allow us to see our average pace and intensity over the whole run or over each mile. But what if you’re just wondering how hard you worked on that quarter-mile hill on the way home?
Miller’s site lets you plot your heart rate vs grade of the him and pace vs grade of the hill and then fit a line to the data. “The slope of the line will quantify ‘Just exactly how much do I slow down when running up a hill of xx grade?’” Miller explains.
Pretty cool! But that’s not all.
A runner can use the cadence vs grade chart to figure out how much they are shortening their stride on hills.
The Graph tab of Miller’s website shows the standard pace vs distance graph that you’ll see anywhere else, but you can click and drag anywhere to zoom in on a specific segment. All the data readjusts to give you averages of just that area,
“It becomes trivially easy to find out your average pace during the tempo portion of a tempo run– even if you didn’t start and end the tempo pace exactly at an even mile marker.”
On the Zones tab of the website, GraphMyRun takes all of your running data and puts it into four pace zones. You can use the zones Miller set, or set your own to watch how your intensity changes.
So runners, head on over to GraphMyRun and play around. Cyclists and triathletes doing bike-run brick workouts feeling jealous? Don’t.
“I’ve already reserved the domain GraphMyBrick and will be creating a version of GraphMyRun that can handle bricks.”
We can’t wait to see it! Let us know what you think of GraphMyRun in the comments.
Welcome to the Runnovation Lab, a place for stories about entrepreneurial runners. This series will shine a light on runners who are creating products or services to make the world a better place for other runners. Have someone you’d like to see featured? Email me at natalie.diblasio@runhaven.com