Find out what to wear in the cold, where to buy it and how it helps prevent stress. We've just mailed the November edition of WalkJogRun's newsletter to just under 25,000 members. If you didn't get the memo, check it out.

Last night Jeff and I had another late night fixing some of the annoying bugs in WalkJogRun and made some other tweaks:

• Removed new ad unit when you click create route so it no longer covers the speed/pace controls on small screens
• Re-ordered the create route controls to put the most common items at the top and added the out and back control, previously only found by clicking the finish pin.
• Added a start/finish pin for out and back routes, previously the start and finish pins overlapped making it hard to click on the finish pin.
• Better zoom for more accurate search results - when you search for an address and the Geocoder has street address level accuracy, the map will be zoomed closer than city level accuracy to reflect the fact that you know where your address is on the map. We also added an initial search result pin so you can see where the Geocoder thinks you are looking for.

Several of you reported that when you try to tack on extra mileage to an existing route or make edits to save as a new route, your original route would vanish.

It turns out this was a bug we introduced with the redesign and I've just fixed it. Sorry to anyone who has experienced this and please, please, please, keep telling us if anything stops working suddenly. Chances are, me or Jeff have screwed something up :-)

I ran the Chicago Distance Classic yesterday as part 2 of my 3 race season with Team in Training. After my Indy Mini PR of 1:58:20 I had a good head start on my training with 14 weeks between races to see how much faster I could get. The Team in Training Summer program features speedwork, stretching and ab work on Wednesday nights and so I pushed those sessions pretty hard.

Over the last 14 weeks we've done hill repeats, yasso 800s, strides, intervals and pickups around one of Chicago Lakefront's only hills at Montrose harbor. My pace had gradually been increasing while my heart rate was dropping over the same easy runs week to week and I felt really strong.

After studying my runners world training diary and pouring over the Garmin workout logs I decided to start with the 8 minute mile Chicago Endurance Sports pace group for a finish time of 1:45. I started in the first wave as a consequence and left with the first batch of runners. I stuck it out for the first four laps with splits of 7:46, 7:55, 7:46 and 8:02 but realized I was out of my league when I peaked at my Garmin to see a Heart Rate of 175 bpm, a rate typical towards the end of my workouts so I slowed down to 8:13, 8:01, 8:05 and 8:06 for the next four. At that point I hit the gusting wind from the north and was pegged back to 8:17, 8:54, 8:02 and 8:17 for the next four miles. The last mile and change to the finish I had nothing left in the tank and slugged through at 8:54 to finish with an overall chip time of 1:48:38 - another PR!

I'm really excited because it's one day later and I don't feel like I've been hit by a bus and ready for the next 9 weeks of training to take me to the Chicago marathon where, through my time in this race, I have secured a corral start! I'll throw it out there now so I can remember it but the Greg McMillan Running Calculator predicts that based on my half marathon time, my current level of fitness would indicate a 3:49 marathon. That would be 17 minutes faster than my 2006 San Francisco marathon finish and a PR so I hope it works!

Anyone else run it? What did you think of the course, the weather and the organization?

Two updates this week of note. The biggest announcement is that after meeting John Bingham and Coach Jenny to discuss the site last week, they asked WalkJogRun to be the official map provider for the Chicago Distance Classic Half Marathon! I took the map provided by the route certifier and created the 13.1 mile route. There will be updates to come including aid stations, sponsored water stops and bathrooms but for now it's live at WalkJogRun.net/cdc. I'm running it again this year and looking to beat my Indy Mini time of 1:58:20...

The other announcement is a bug fix. When creating routes you may have noticed that if you clicked to add a turn marker on top of one of the blue route marker lines, it wouldn't register. Last night I changed some code to make it possible to click on the lines to add turn markers.

I had some downtime at my conference in DC so I worked on WalkJogRun and knocked out some frequently requested features.

Draggable turn markers

Now you will see yellow dots at each turn in the route to allow you to drag them around the map and reposition them to be more accurate. You can move the start and finish icons now too. It was an instant winner for me because I created an out and back route using the "return to start" link on the finish marker bubble and was able to drag the return section markers to take a slightly different route on the way back.

Scroll wheel zoom

Since viewing routes across the whole of the US is really a passing curiosity for most visitors and not the purpose of their visit, I added a rule that it would only show routes when you get to a certain zoom level on the map likely to be used to work with routes. This reduced the stress on the server and made it possible to turn the scroll wheel back on again. Give it a shot!

One of the most common comments I get about WalkJogRun is from people who tell me they are glad they don't have to drive their routes any more to work out how far they go. 212,000 routes represent 1,354,000 miles. At an average of 30 miles per gallon that is 45,133 gallons of gas! I realize that technically not every visitor maps their route out and measures it with a car but I'm glad to be helping just a little.

It's been a long week and I was glad to have the extra hour in bed this morning with a rest day in the training schedule. We ran the 4.5 mile, 3 mile, 4.5 mile schedule Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday but yesterday brought a different kind of stress.

I did my first newsletter mailing today to the 6,000 members who opted in over the last year to WalkJogRun for infrequent email updates and I've got to tell you - it was a blast! I wrote the content and Jeff put together a design for the format, correcting a few things here and there. At 1pm CST 6,000 WalkJogRun members emails were on their way and we had 5 mins to wait before the stats started to come in.

The first response is all the bounces from mail servers around the world declaring that users are no longer there. Next was a swarm of Out of Office replies in the reply to email address box. Some of these were "I'll be out of the office until..." but some were "I'll be out of the office - forever! I no longer work at ...". Some of these were really funny to read, others straightforward. Being obsessive about things like this, every 15 minutes I would hit refresh to see the open rate and clickthrough rate climbing. As it stands at 2pm (26 hours into the mailing) there have been 1,729 unique opens and a 486 clickthroughs to the site or the articles, 34 people have unsubscribed and 176 emails bounced. I've had some really nice notes from people saying how much the enjoy using the site and that we should even ask for forgiveness and permission from our wives to keep up the hard work adding new features!

If anyone has any questions about running topics you think I may be able to answer or questions about how to use the site, feel free to drop me a line and you may even see your question reposted here in the blog for everyone's benefit. If you didn't receive the mailing you can see it here.

I was just asked by a local magazine, Windy City Sports, to provide some information about WalkJogRun for an upcoming article. As I was writing it I thought it might be good to share the information with the visitors to the site:

WalkJogRun was a personal project back in 2003 when I started running with a room mate in Atlanta. I've always been nuts about analyzing things so not knowing how far we were going and how fast drove me crazy. The first version required you to upload your own map to the site, draw your route and see the mileage add up. My girlfriend at the time moved to Chicago shortly after this so a year later I made the move back to Chicago. The map has always been centered on my house and since I still live in Chicago it is focussed there.

This has obviously drawn the attention of local Chicago folk and even mainstream media like Fox News Chicago. There are 76,000 routes worldwide and over 2,250 here in Chicago placing it third in the US after New York (3,400), DC (3,050) and ahead of San Francisco (2,200). London, England has by far the largest number of routes with over 9,100 submitted. I'm from Manchester, England originally so some of the popularity comes from the PR of having your family share the website with everyone they know. It even has a separate domain name walkjogrun.co.uk. I often get emails asking if I could a version build a version of the site for people in other countries which is funny because, you can use the one site to look and add routes anywhere in the world - even Japan and Australia.

The starting point for using the site is either to use the mouse to drag and zoom the map to your neighborhood or enter your zipcode and hit GO to relocate the map. Last month the 60614 was the most common zipcode search followed 60657. Once you are looking at the list of routes, another popular feature of the site is to filter the list of routes to a distance you are interested in running (or walking, skating, cycling). The most common distance used to filter the routes is 3 miles which accounts for 30% of all filters. 10k is the next most popular at 20% with 5% of the traffic looking for marathon routes! (I have attached the full table if you need it).

If you can't find an existing route or you want to map out your own, you simply click the "Create a route" button in the top right corner of the map and start clicking to mark out each turn. Living close to the lake I often switch the map to "Hybrid" mode (also in the top right) to see the satellite images of the neighborhood so I can follow the path more easily. Each click you make gets added to the route and you can drag the map around to go past the edge currently visible on the screen. The status box at the bottom of the map constantly updates to reflect the distance, the time it would take at 3mph and the calories you would burn if you are 190 pounds (yes, my average weight). You can edit the settings to personalize the results to your own speed and weight. Don't worry - I don't keep that information - it's all kept in a cookie on your machine you can easily delete. If you make a mistake with a click you can click "remove marker" in the top right to backtrack.

When you have finished recording your route click "save route" to finish. A bubble pops open to ask you for a title and a description. You also have the option of creating a free account to create a way to claim your route when it appears on the map. If you have an account it also means you have the option of keeping a route private so that only you can see it when you are logged in to the site. Once you save a route it refreshes the page to show you the overview of the route. You can bookmark that page if it is a route you run often but you can always come back to the site and use the search box to find it by name instead. You also have the option to email it to a friend or family member so they can review an upcoming run.

The site gets about 3,000 visitors per day on average or 100,000 pageviews. The fun part is that it is running on 2 computers in a closet in our spare bedroom. One of the computers has a squeaky fan so when guests come to stay we joke that WalkJogRun is powered by mice.

There is more history about the site and some feedback from users.

There is lots more to tell and much more planned for the site including training diaries, running groups and a ratings system.

Since my 3 mile run on Friday morning my the top of my hamstrings near my glutes have been a little tight. I'm sure I overdid it running so fast so soon after the marathon. It's not unbearable but a little uncomfortable. I took the opportunity to rest yesterday and today so I'll get back on track tomorrow.

I've just updated WalkJogRun with the code I've had in development for some time. Here are the highlights:

• Create a route button - allows you to clear the points off the map so you no longer need to avoid starting a route at the exact starting point of a previous route.
• Find a route link - once you are clicking around the tabs you can lose the place where you search for routes so I created a link permanently on the screen.
• New logo - Jeff refined the logo and added the tagline from the competition winner "Putting runners on the map"
• Powered by BlueDragon logo - I wanted to acknowledge the folks at New Atlanta for the donation of a license to power the site.
• Elevation - I've added elevation lookups and created a way to summarize the elevation change from gentle to severe. This information now appears as you click on the finish pin while you are creating a route and on the route pin when you are viewing the route overview.
• Distances are now shown in both Miles and KM for the route overview.
• Saucy icons from FamFamFam for most of the operations and a simplified layout should make the interface a little cleaner. Route overviews also include a clickable link to view more routes by the person who created the route.