Use a GPS watch and scripts to generate route maps with no effort other than the running itself.

GPS RUNNING LOG
Automatically download exercise routes from
a Garmin watch and convert them to animated
Google Maps on your website. By Dave Mabe

As a technogeek and a serious runner, I love it when my two worlds collide. That’s what happened when I started wearing a GPS running watch to log my runs. Previously, I had laboriously maintained a paper log by hand. But the GPS watch let me automate the process with some Perl code.

Illustration by Damien Scogin

Around the same time I got the watch, the Google Maps API was released, which allows you to set up a Google Map with custom tracks and labels on your website using JavaScript. So, I also wrote some scripts to display each run as a Google Map on my blog. The race was on!

The watch I use is the Garmin Forerunner 201,
which has been on the market for a while, and like
many GPS devices, loses reception in wooded areas

and near tall buildings. Garmin says its newer Forerunner 205 can get reception in these areas.

 

Getting and Massaging the Data The watch recharges and syncs with your computer through a cradle that connects via serial cable. To pull the data off the watch, I used an open source command-line program called GPSBabel ( gpsbabel.org), which reads and converts among a variety of GPS file formats. I needed to read the GPS data off my watch in the Garmin logbook file format and then convert it to XML in Google Maps’ glogbook format. I used the following command: