Interactive pace chart

We’re continuing to work our way through all the charts on Smashrun, making them interactive one by one. This weekend, we’re updating the pace chart on the bottom of the By Run page. It’s been a staple since Smashrun began, but it’s always been, let’s face it, kind of underwhelming. It’s a bar graph with pace, no more no less. We discussed ripping it out and starting fresh, adding some textures, and shadows, maybe a cute little bubble tooltip and a couple of gradients here and there.

Then we sobered up the next morning, and came to our senses. We realized that old run chart is a classic. It’s a pair of tried and true NB 574’s. Understated, free of pretense. It says how fast when. No animated bubble tooltip required. But we thought, what if we took that old classic and dropped a brand new engine in it?

Say hello to your new run chart. It’s just like the old run chart. But behold! It does stuff.

Mouse over your run graph, click and drag to select an area of your run. You’ll immediately see the average pace for the selected area. You can drag your selection, expand or reduce it, and see how your pace changed over various splits. The nice thing is that you can see any split you want. You can, for example, compare each 10k split of a marathon, or the pace of each effort and recovery over a set of intervals.

This new functionality is available for all users Pro and Free alike, but we cooked up something extra if you’re a Smashrun Pro user. We’ve added an elevation gain/loss chart just below the run chart. You can use this to find the elevation gain of individual climbs and descents, and compare your pace and average heart rate.

And when you double click any section it’ll open up in the pro map for further analysis.

We also took this opportunity to earn a few more grey hairs by doing some serious data reconciliation. We coded the run graph in one programming language, and the pro run map in another, so we could reconcile between them. With pauses, floating points rounding issues, and intermittent data this was no small feat. To make this all happen, we’ve also started interpolating meaningful trackpoints (if your watch records a point at 1.96km and at 2.07km, we estimate your pace/HR/cadence at 2.0km). We’ve added some minor GPS error correction, and we’ve revised our elevation calculations to use more sophisticated resampling and error correction techniques.

This was all, of course, a total, utter, and complete nightmare. And there’s no doubt that with millions of runs now in the system, you’re going to run into at least a few issues. Let us know what you find and we’ll sort it out.

Also there’s a terrifying new color picker by Megan Zombie.

PS: Some runs imported on Sunday will have incorrect calories. We’re working on correcting these. But any new runs imported starting Monday should be okay!