Last night, in preparation for next week’s release, we added two new tags within the By Run page that allows you to exclude bad elevation and/or HR data from any runs. So, in the event that you lose GPS, find yourself with spiky elevation or HR, you can just click on the “Bad Elevation” or “Bad HR” tag and we’ll remove it!

You can use the tags for personal reference (e.g. they won’t recalculate anything) or you can use the tags to actually remove the data from any calculations or visualizations where they apply.

For Smashrun Pro users, you will be prompted if you’d like to exclude elevation data from the Overview pages, the Pro Map, the Change in pace over route chart, and your Training Bands. If you click “no”, the elevation data isn’t actually excluded – it just highlights the tag.

For HR data, both Pro and non-Pro users can click on “Bad HR” to exclude HR data from a particular run. That means it will no longer show up on your pace chart. If you’re using Smashrun Pro, we’ll also exclude HR from the Pro Map and your Training Bands.

Note: if you’ve ever run with a friend and you’ve had to use their data because your watch died or your app flaked in the middle of the run, you can also use the bad HR tag to remove their HR in case they happened to track it.

And, if you mistakenly apply either tag, you can undo it by deselecting the tag(s).

We hope you find them useful!

• For Smashrun Pro users, when you double-click a highlighted segment on the pace chart, it now auto-zooms into that segment within the Pro Map
• We now detect “walks” and “run/walks” and have adjusted the way cadence is displayed for them in the Pro Map
• “Walks” will have the “fastest similar walks” instead of “fastest runs of a similar distance” displayed in By Run
• Duration is now displayed on the List page

As always, if you notice anything out of the ordinary, let us know by emailing us at hi@smashrun.com.

Windows Phone users can now use Caledos Runner to track runs and auto-send it to Smashrun! Caledos is a free app that supports SensorCore technology and Bluetooth SMART devices. It has built-in audio cues in 9 languages and just recently released live tracking. Setup is super easy, it’s free, and you can even run with it “offline”.

To set it up, load Caledos Runner on your Windows Phone, then:

– go to settings > Share

– select Smashrun > authenticate

– enabling sharing

After each run, when you click save, you’ll be prompted to share your run to Smashrun!

Make sure you give it a go if you’re on the lookout for a Windows Phone running app! The developers are also pretty cool and they are quite keen to hear from their users. Just check out their ongoing collection of postcards from runners all over the world.

When Mapbox released their Run, Hike, Bike map, we thought it would be a step closer towards better route discovery. Yet, we found that it didn’t really do a good job of highlighting the information that runners might care about most.

At our default zoom level when displaying your run, you don’t really see much. And the streets, regardless of whether or not it’s a main thoroughfare or a motorway, are virtually indistinguishable.

This is okay for a minimalist map, but we wanted it to be better. So we switched over to Mapbox’s Outdoors map, which includes the same elevation detail, but with greater landcover data so it’s easier to discover trails, hikes, or footpaths that are off the beaten track.

Then we modified it to de-emphasize anything that runners don’t really care about such as:

• miscellaneous points of interest including shops, hospitals, universities, etc.
• colorful building outlines
• green areas that you can’t actually go to (like areas of tourist attractions)

Afterwards, we differentiated the main roads and motorways from streets and highlighted any footways, paths, designated hikes, and trails (they’re all some shade of dotted green line) – basically, any place where you can probably run, you’ll be able to find it. Bike paths are shown as red dotted lines for anyone who wants to avoid them (or for the duathletes among us).

We toned down the colors (a lot), adjusted the level of detail per zoom level, included some additional basic points of interest like tramways, and railways – if you really zoom in, you’ll find the cafe’s (for the early birds) and bars (for the night owls). And now we’ve got a slightly better map for planning runs and viewing them as well!

Of course, all of this data is entirely based on Open Streetmap (OSM), which is open sourced. So, if you see something missing or incorrect, you can just create an account/login on OSM and sort it out!

Cooper test

A Cooper test is a benchmark run that you can use to estimate your VO2 max. It’s pretty simple. You go to a track. Then, well, you just start running like a crazy person until the 12 minutes are up. That’s pretty much it.

The problem is that unless you’re a professional athlete running 12 minutes at maximal effort will pretty much grind you to dust. Don’t even consider doing it if you have the slightest worry about your heart, or if you still have weight to cut, or if you’ve recently recovered from an injury. But if you’re feeling pretty good about you’re training a Cooper test will set an important benchmark, when you look back for years to come you’ll know the answer to what you were really capable of.

If you’re a Smashrun pro user you can tag your run as a Cooper Test and you’ll get a special view of your run on the by run page. You’ll see an estimate of your VO2Max, and a rating of your VO2 Max based on your age/gender. You’ll also be able to compare this Cooper test to other ones you’ve run in the past.

This week we also added a new setting on the profile page to make all of the labels brighter on the report pages. When you set it, the pages might be a little less clean looking but they’ll definitely be easier to read.

We’ve added a new visual layer to Smashrun’s Overview pages! Now you can interact with the distance charts, Trailing mileage charts, Runs distance vs. pace, and an infinitely more useful version of Days run vs. days without.

The interactivity should provide more transparency to your data so you can actually dig in and discover additional metrics such as number of runs, average pace in different time periods, % of runs above a certain distance or pace, without ever having to leave your Overview page. Here’s the detailed rundown.

Miles/kilometers per month/day

Mouse over any of the bars within Miles/Kilometers per month to see number of runs, total distance, and average pace. Average SPI will also show up for Smashrun Pro users. If you click on a given month, it will take you to that month’s overview page. Likewise, if you’re on the month view and you click on a day, it will take you to the run.

In addition, you can also mouse over the values along the y-axis, to see which percentage of your runs (or which months/days) are greater than a certain distance. This allows you to get a better sense of your base mileage – plus, it’s kind of interesting to see how much of your monthly volume or daily runs are above or below a certain distance!

Trailing mileage charts

This has always been a bit tricky to explain. Because it’s “trailing”, any given point along a trailing mileage chart is the cumulative result of a preceding period. In other words, it’s a rolling total distance.

Any point within the All Time view will show the period of one year, points within the yearly view will show the trailing 90-day period, and points within the monthly view will show the trailing 7-days.

Now that you can interact with the trailing mileage charts, you can actually see which months/days contributed to any point within the chart. You’ll also see which runs are included on the Miles/km per month, Runs distance vs. pace, and the daily/weekly stats calendar.

Runs distance vs. pace/SPI

Runs distance vs. pace chart (the scatterplot) now shows the % of runs faster than a certain pace and/or greater than a certain distance. This will give you a much clearer understanding of your run distribution. You can now also select a run from within the scatterplot and it will take you to the By Run page.

Move your cursor over the y-axis values to see what percentage of runs are faster than a certain pace. Mouse over the x-axis values to see what percentage of runs are longer than a certain distance. To see runs greater than a certain distance and pace, move your cursor within the scatterplot.

For Smashrun Pro users, you can switch the scatterplot to display Runs distance vs. SPI. This will help you compare your runs based on performance instead of average pace.

So if, for instance, you wanted a quick and easy way to spot your 10 best runs this month (or top 10 runs for the year or even all time!), now you can. And you can click on the run within the scatterplot to view its By Run page.

Weekly and Daily stats for the year/month

We replaced Days run vs. days without with a calendar heat map that visualizes your weekly and daily training volume. The colors will help you distinguish between the high and low volume weeks or days, which can be really useful when you’re reviewing your training history and you want to figure out in which weeks or days you ran the most. All you have to do is mouse over the distance brackets.

In the All Time view, it shows your weekly stats for each year. From this, you can see in which years you might have been training for an event like a marathon, because you’ll spot the high mileage weeks in white.

In the yearly view, you’ll see your daily stats for the year. Each day of the week has its own row. Because of this, you can answer questions like: on which days do I run the least distance or when do I usually run long?

In the monthly view, it’ll be the daily stats for the month, which includes the total distance for each week (just after every Sunday).

There were many breaking changes in this release, so please keep us posted and send us an email at hi@smashrun.com if you encounter any issues.

Other big changes…

• Importer – if you’re importing multiple runs for the same day (e.g. if you ran twice today), both runs will get imported at the same time whereas before every run entered the main import queue
• Prompt to publish – if your FB post preference is set to “prompt to publish” and you just imported multiple runs, the prompt will always default to the longest run that you just imported instead of the last run that was imported
• Same logic above applies to auto-publish
• iSmoothRun/Run.GPS users, and anyone importing via email: you should now get prompt to publish and post-import notifications
• Import via email – the “you’ve got mail” notification now only shows up once when bulk importing > 20 runs, otherwise you’ll just get the “we successfully imported your run” modal
• Multi-sport – you can now retrieve the run portion(s) of a multi-sport activity from Garmin Connect (yeah!)

We also recently updated the running apps page to reflect recent testing with Android apps and Windows Phone apps, and, in case you missed our last post, Smashrun is now integrated with RunGap (which can help you retrieve your stats from Strava and Suunto, among many others, and into Smashrun).