Running sat nav

robinph

Have a bit of a running challenge being put on in a couple of weeks. We have an hour to run around Bristol and take pictures of ourselves with as many Gorillas as possible. The team making it back with the most pictures in the best time wins a prize, most likely a few beers so it's obviously very important that my team wins.
http://bristolculture.wordpress.com/2011/07/08/gorillas-roam-the-streets-of-bristol/

Now I can try and remember the locations and approximate route as best I can, but with the number of GPS devices it must be possible to get one of them to direct me in the right direction? Does loading the likes of a forerunner with a route give much in the way of directional guidance as I've never made use of it for that kind of thing before?

I think I could load up the likes of a GPSMap with a number of way points, but that is possibly not the most convenient to carry or to deal with if we miss a location.

Any ideas of the best way to navigate for some urban orienteering?

Krusty_Clown

Hi Robin, there's no reason you can't use a road-based sat nav. However, routing tends to be on a car/motorcycle basis, so you'll add distance/lose time with one way streets etc, unless the GPS receiver supports 'pedestrian' routing.

One option might be to plot a course in Mapsource, cycle it with your Garmin, then upload it afterwards as a course. But to be honest, it's fraught with potential problems.

I reckon the best thing to do is plot a map in mapsource, get to know the route in Google maps, print a map, and run like hell!

TheRoadRunner

Krusty_Clown wrote: »

One option might be to plot a course in Mapsource, cycle it with your Garmin, then upload it afterwards as a course. But to be honest, it's fraught with potential problems.

+1. Would be my advice although as KC says there are many problems involved with this.

Krusty_Clown wrote: »

print a map, and run like hell!

Or you could always cheat and head out the day before, adjust time/date settings on camera and get pics with gorillas. I'm joking of course but out of interest do they have a way to make sure people don't do this. Do they supply the cameras?

robinph

We are supplying our own cameras, but they will be checking for what we are wearing that day, and probably the weather, if you had a shave that morning and how knackered you look in each shot could be used against us.

Think I will have to rely on the trying to remember locations as best I can and fun like hell. Have been trying to figure out a potential route, but I only know half the area well'ish and there is a feck off big hill to run back up to finish whatever we do. Also have to allow for crossing roads and traffic, and just finding the damn gorillas. Should be "fun" though, just have to make sure I win the beer.

Krusty_Clown

Or just download these photos, and photoshop yourself in. I'm not suggesting you cheat... Well, ok, actually, I am..

Gringo78

Do you have an iphone 4 or android? With a GPS running app like Runmeter:

You can plot a course online, download as a GPX file and upload it to Runmeter and then use as a route...this will show then on a map as you run as a purple line showing where you must run while your actual route will be a blue line. You can switch then whenever to the camera when you want to photgraph the gorilla and if you have the GPS setting On, the photos will also be GPS tagged.

Krusty_Clown

Clown wrote:

Or just download these photos, and photoshop yourself in. I'm not suggesting you cheat... Well, ok, actually, I am..

Or better still, click here.

robinph

Krusty_Clown wrote: »

Or better still, click here.

Sorted.

Gringo78

You should be careful - a bunch of youths running around Bristol in tracksuits is likely not going to go down well with the Police at the moment

robinph

Well all my plans of the best route to take nearly went out the window this morning when we were told that we each had to start from a specific gorilla, so that meant we had to run in a different way than I had figured out and past a few other gorillas that we couldn't count towards our total.

We were a bit lucky though that our first gorilla was in a highly populated gorilla area so could then carry on an collect a good number of them despite a slow start. With time penalties for getting back to the start point in over an hour we didn't do too bad for time doing 8.3 miles, including hills, in 1:02 ... and 23 gorillas "captured".

Here is the one outside BBC Bristol which we got on the way back after some chuffing steep hills, with my team mate collapsed on top of it. I was just taking pictures:


...and more importantly we won the trophy and some alcohol which I'll be tucking into shortly:



I think 2nd had managed to get 19 gorillas.