The Little Running App That Could

I've used a few. But they all die. First, they lose the ability to create a post to Facebook. This is understandable since Facebook constantly changes how they interact with apps and the apps are mostly done by a hobbyist, who just wanted to try out a new skill but has moved on and can't be bothered to maintain the site. Next goes the post to Twitter and the ability to log a run on Facebook. All that remains is the site itself, which starts to error-out and not let you post to it, or it renders your 5.5 mile 8:21 pace into 100,329,285.10007 miles at who cares what pace? Strangely, they will still let you download all the past runs.

I've been using RunningAHEAD for a bit over 5 years now and well, you can only post at the site and it no longer makes Facebook posts or Tweets, though it does update the sidebar on this blog (upper left corner, see?). But it works! 8,004 miles of posts. The average pace is 7:59/mile. It will soon be over 8:00 since I rarely do sub-8 workouts any more.

This mileage is a fraction of the total since I took up running 15 years ago: First of all, it excludes the high mileage I was doing in the marathon era--I ran 5 between 2008 and 2011. The whole 15 years is probably something like 25k miles.