We’ve just spent the weekend staying with friends in Amsterdam (or just outside, in a suburb called Amstelveen). I’ve not spent any proper time in Amsterdam – visiting once around 20 years ago for a clothes trade show, which involved flying in, getting a taxi to the venue, staying there all day, taxi back to the airport, flight home. So all in all not seeing anything of Amsterdam or getting any sort of feel for the place or the people.
Thankfully this wasn’t the case this weekend and I also got the opportunity to do something I absolutely love when I go somewhere new – plot a route in my Suunto app, send it to my watch and go explore. Of all the tech advances in watches over the last 20 years or so, the ability to map routes and send them to watches is possibly my favourite. Long gone are the days of plotting a map on the internet, working out and remembering the various distances and then calculating times when you reached these points. Now this was all fine for places you knew (such as for me running up the River Lea back training for New York in 2004), but what it wasn’t great for was helping me plot a route to run somewhere new. This is so helpful and so, so valuable to me – having used this feature from Australia, through Europe to America and helping me traverse my way through the Lake District & Welsh mountains in the UK. I love the freedom it gives me – as I have no real idea of where I’m going (aside from a line on a map with geographical features). So yes, I may have contours to indicate elevation, roads, rivers, etc, but what I don’t have is a context for these things. I don’t know the plants & people that are on the routes (or in Asutralia’s case the wildlife). All of this I then get from following the route on my watch, which helps me absorb the landscape of the place I am at.
So the example of this weekend was great – 2 runs, one Saturday and one on Sunday. The above map was from my run on Sunday. I wanted to experience running along canals, what the life was like alongside them and who else used them. The route I plotted looked like it would give me that variety, taking me down a wide and larger canal, then back up a canal that appeared to run through the middle of green open space (what this was I wouldn’t know until I ran). The picture under the map was from an early part of the run that stretched away for over 1km. A really well paved straight road, with a small space for a car in down the middle, with cycle paths left and right. When I reached the large canal I got to see the variety of runners & cyclists out for morning exercise. A mixture of club riders and some pretty fast guys on time trial set up bikes, heads down and powering away. The roads are wonderfully kept, which makes running on the cycle paths enticing and enjoyable. I ran through a well kept, wealthier area that had a tug & cable affair to help people cross the canal. Which to me seemed stereotypically Dutch.
I got lucky with the wind – having not checked which direction it was blowing in it turned out I had it against me (which seemed fine) on the way down the larger wiggly canal. However once I’d crossed over the large main road and hit the straight path through the fields the wind picked up, behind me and drove me forwards. Haggard faces from those running against it met me as I passed the odd runner coming in the other direction. As I reached the last 2k of this long stretch I felt the urge to relax, open my legs a little and run faster. Then I was back into the suburban estates I had started in and it was done.
Whilst it was always possible to go for a long run pre the days of watch navigation, for me it adds something being able to plot a route to follow. Not being worried about finding my way back, contextualising what you see on a map as you move through the environment, for me, helps embed the experience of where you are. It feels more engaging having to look at a map, choose a route based on how long you want to run, remember the rough topology of the place and then seeing how much or what matches up with your expectations. I also thoroughly enjoyed the fact I’m healthy enough to go out and get some miles into my legs for a good hours run.
