Map My Walk

While he didn't recommend it to me directly, John McCrarey did mention that he used the Map My Walk app for, well, mapping out the walks he does. The app can generate a mess of stats about whatever walk you do, and its claim to fame is that it draws your route (you can set when/where your route officially begins and when/where it ends). Commenter Brian suggested that this sort of satellite-assisted app might give accurate distance results. I've been hesitant to use such apps: I tried out Google Maps's own version of this years ago and became paranoid when I realized the thing was essentially recording my routes and presumably making that data available to mysterious third parties. The problem with worrying about that now is obvious: I sacrificed my privacy the moment I chose to have a smartphone. At this point, how rational is it for me to worry about whether strangers can see my comings and goings? I've been on the grid for years, so why not get another app?

My ex-coworker at the office used to rely on an app called Strava for his biking. He swore by it. When I went to the Google Play store, however, I saw that Strava had an average rating of 4.4 while Map My Walk had an average of 4.8, so I decided to go with Map My Walk, which seems to be made specifically for walkers, anyway. I'm going to try the app out tonight, mapping the route from my office to Jamshil Bridge to my apartment. (This will also count as Toe Wound Experiment #2.) Assuming I did an accurate job of mapping that route on Naver Map with Naver's ruler tool, I'm guessing my distance tonight will be around 14 km (Naver had me at around 13.96 km). Since my pedometer is always on, I can also cross-compare the Map My Walk results with the pedometer. There'll be a bit of difference, of course, because the pedometer is literally always on, so it's been counting my steps since I got up. I'll have to either mentally guesstimate how many steps/minutes to subtract from the pedometer total, or I can note my pedometer total before I start walking tonight's route, then do the math from there.

More later after I collect data.