Mapping Eight Years of Running
I finally did something I’d been meaning to do for years: pulled every run I’ve ever logged on Strava and turned it into a real dashboard. Not a screenshot of Strava’s own charts, but an actual interactive site, built from my own export of the data, with filters, tooltips, and a few visualizations Strava doesn’t give you out of the box.
The numbers, going back to my first logged run in June 2019: 711 runs, 3,922 miles, 544 hours moving, and a little over 164,000 feet of climbing. That’s enough to summit Everest from sea level close to six times over. 2022 was the biggest year by a wide margin, 1,011 miles, which tracks, since that’s the year I was deep into marathon training and had fewer excuses not to run.
The part I had the most fun building was the world map. I’ve GPS-tracked runs in 29 different places, and laid out on an actual map, the data basically draws my last few years for me without me having to say a word: a thick cluster of runs in Chicago that stops cold in early 2023, and a new cluster in Columbus that picks up right around the same time, because that’s when I moved. Under that are all the smaller dots: San Diego, where I go often enough that it shows up as a real secondary base, plus one-off runs from work trips and vacations, Rome, Barcelona, Malta, Moab, a few ski towns. There’s a route heatmap too, for whichever three places I’ve run most, and it updates with the year filter rather than staying locked to any fixed set of cities, so switching years actually shows you the streets I was wearing down wherever I happened to be living or traveling at the time.
I also broke things out by shoe and by workout type, mostly out of curiosity. Turns out I’m pretty loyal to Hoka once I find a model I like, and the vast majority of my miles fall into the “easy / recovery” bucket rather than anything structured, which is either a training philosophy or a mild character flaw, depending on who you ask.
One honest data point, since I wrote about training for the 2025 Columbus Marathon on this blog: I didn’t beat my PR. My first Columbus Marathon in 2023 came in at 3:47, and the 2025 race came in at 4:13, about 26 minutes slower. There’s a real reason for it this time: I rolled my ankle about two weeks before race day and spent the last stretch of training just hoping I’d be able to start, let alone race well. Then race day itself turned into a steady, heavy downpour for most of the course. I finished, which given the ankle and the weather felt like its own kind of win, but the PR is still out there waiting for next time.
If you want to dig into your own slice of it, pick a year, look at pace trends, see where the mileage went, the dashboard is fully interactive, right down to the map. Have a look and let me know what you find.