Living in Boston in 2003, I noticed that my daily car commute gradually caused me get out of shape. I figured that jogging around the Charles River might do me some good, but it was hard to stay motivated after a few runs. I didn’t know how far I was really running or if I was getting any faster, and I wanted to find other places to run. It wasn’t practical to measure the route by driving (not accurate!) or forking over hundreds of $$ for a GPS device just to answer the question “How far am I running?”Fast forward one year and I’m in sunny Palo Alto, a graduate student at Stanford. My dad signed me up for the San Francisco Half-Marathon and I started training “for real”. At the time, training meant lots of laps around the Stanford Campus Drive Loop. After running the race, I figured there must be a better way to map my routes and I decided to build RunThere!
San Francisco Marathon 3-D flyover on RunThere.com
I’m Leo. With Sirin, I co-founded RunThere.com, which started as a simple Mapquest hack. A few months later, the Google Maps API was released, making it much easier to build powerful mapping tools. We rebuilt the site as a simple service to let anyone measure their exact running and biking routes, but we weren’t finished just yet. After the initial release, we continued to add new features such as a training log and route searching.
When we added Facebook Connect in April ‘09, our signup process was simplified to a single-click, and inviting friends became much easier. A month later, we were ecstatic to learn that fbFund had chosen RunThere as a finalist for the summer program. In mid-June, we hit the ground running (pun intended) and have worked quickly to redesign much of the site and add new social features. Our users now share route maps, logged runs/bike rides, and can create group runs and rides on Facebook.
Here’s a fun video we made as an introduction for fbFund REV.
Our mission is to help people stay motivated in their training, whether they’re trying to go faster, lose weight, or just stay in shape. We’ve seen that once you start sharing your mundane training runs with friends, odds are they’ll motivate or even join you on your next run!
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