Nepal Love
The devastating earthquake that hit Nepal on April 25 has killed at least 8,000 people and injured more than 10,000, according to the latest reports. The scenes of misery and chaos have prompted people to crowdfund donations like crazy.
And all over the world, people have walked, run, biked, climbed, had dinner, baked and stitched to raise money for Nepal. Time has a list of places to which you can donate, if you haven’t already.
Here in Bangkok, runners have been braving the hot weather to support Nepal, with two fundraisers over the weekend alone. (See last week’s post on how to survive training in crushing heat.)
We Run Nepal
A brand-new bike park threw open its doors Saturday — but to runners.
Tucked away in Bangkok’s northern suburb of Lad Prao, Peppermint Bike Park is a tidy little collection of paved trails that go over moguls, bridges and reclaimed timbers.
There’s moguls and sick downhills, bridges and old timbers to ride across.
And many opportunities for photos.
.
Thais love to take photos.
Peppermint Field is a brand of peppermint oil nasal inhaler that’s very popular in Thailand. It’s supposed to clear up your sinuses
Human Run for Nepal
On Sunday, hundreds of runners gathered at Rot Fai Park for the Human Run for Nepal. We got new shoes for that event from shoeadviser.com since they offered great discounts on their annual clearance sale.
Rot Fai is just north of the famous Chatuchak Weekend Market and is one of our favorite places for bicycling. 
But on Sunday, again the runners took over.
And took more pictures.
I love to take photos of Thais taking photos.
Don’t have abs? Draw ‘em on!
Remember Nepal!
Sort and filter of bookmaked routes
For everyone who uses our bookmarked routes feature, there’s some good news! We’ve recently released changes that will allow you to sort or filter the list of routes you’ve saved through gmap-pedometer.com. And we made things better for mobile use too.
Sorting
You can now sort the list of bookmarks by any field (distance, name, description, date, even the elevation fields.) It works a little differently on desktop than it does on mobile: for desktop users click the column heading, for mobile tap the name of the field the data is currently sorted by. Watch the videos below to see it in action.
Filtering
We’ve also added the ability to filter on any field. If you want to see all your five-mile routes, just start typing “5.” and all fields that don’t match that will disappear. It works across all fields at once, so you can filter on name just as easily as date or distance. It’s also shown in the videos.
Mobile
And we build an entire separate UI for mobile users for the bookmark list. We hope you agree it’ll make the list much easier to read on a tiny screen.
These features are available for any user who creates an account and uses the bookmarked route feature. If you haven’t, what are you waiting for? It’s free and you get a nifty workout logger too! Enjoy, and let us know what you think!
desktop
mobile
Fully Clothed Showers, Frozen Hands and Other Pro Tips for Hot-Weather Workouts
Expert advice from the people who live and train in the tropics.
Who’d you rather be: the guy with the parasol or the guy in the ambulance?
Hello, beloved users of Gmaps Pedometer.
Hope Iron Man hydrated
We have to admit something to you. Not everyone on our team suffered through winter. In fact, one of us spent the months of November through February perfecting the art of floating around on a pool raft.
I confess: That’s me, and I live in Bangkok.
All that floating and daydreaming ate away at my workout mojo, though. Now that it’s insanely hot and humid here, it’s even harder to make myself run outdoors. So I did what anyone would do: Signed up for a race.
My husband and I managed to complete this 3K in about 21 minutes and were delighted we didn’t collapse. The temperature at the 6 a.m. starting time was 81 degrees, and the humidity was 65 percent.
By the end, I was as sopping as if I’d gone for a dip in the nearby Mae Klong River. Which I wouldn’t because they have stingrays the size of submarines.
Watch out for the aquatic life, sneaker guy.
We were two of the only Westerners there, but even the locals were suffering from the heat, especially the brave souls who ran the 12.8K. So that got me wondering: How do the die-hards who run here make it?
The family that runs in costume together stays together.
I turned to the Facebook page of Bangkok Runners, a group of craaazy and awesome people who run here all the time. Someone asked this very question recently, and they had a ton of great responses.
Here’s some of their tips for training in the Land of Smiles.
Pre-run fried noodles = bad. Post-run = excellent.
- Avoid the midday heat. Train at dawn or dusk.
- Hydrate from the moment you wake up.
- Jump into the shower fully clothed before you head out.
- Carry a frozen bottle of water. Keeping your hands cool helps.
- Take breaks every 2 km or so. Grab drinks at convenience stores. Nip into park bathrooms and splash water on your head.
- Bring a hydration pack for longer sessions.
- Avoid rice and fried food. Eat fruit and drink coconut water.
- Get used to the heat. Train in it as much as you can stand. Keep your air conditioning low.
Maybe most importantly:
Forget about your time until you adjust.
Fruit and a blue drink after the race. They’ve earned it!
Some gear we can’t live without
We here at Gmaps Pedometer are just like all of you. We have lives.
First of all, we run this website. Second of all, we do everything else: Work at our day jobs, raise children, shop for groceries and celebrate anniversaries. So, like you, we’ve had to get pretty creative over the years about ways to squeeze in our training.
This has led to some strange scheduling, with workouts happening after children are asleep or in the nasty predawn hours before a commute. But you gotta do what you gotta do, right? Body isn’t gonna train itself. We know you’ve all been there, staring down a marathon date or competing with an office buddy over who can lose the most weight.
So we’ve decided to share with you some of our favorite items of gear. The stuff that’s there for us when we blearily reach for it on a 22-degree morning. The stuff that keeps us warm and safe.
The stuff that gets the job done.
LL Bean Fleece
One of our favorite basic cool-weather layers. Our site mastermind Paul wears it when the weather is in the 40s up to about 55.
This family and Bean go way back, ever since one of our clan decided to go to college in Maine, and we are no less delighted with its flagship store than we were when we first visited back in the early ‘90s.
Now, we’re lucky enough to be able to swing through Freeport at least once a year for a marathon (ha!) shopping session on our way to our annual family retreat on Mount Desert Island.
Bean fleece: As comfortable as a teddy bear, as fierce as a grizzly.
LightSpur LED heel clip
Gmaps wants you to shine bright like a diamond, especially so that you don’t get hit by a car.
The handy little LightSpur clips to your heel so that your moving foot is visible. Up. Down. Up. Down. Drivers may be so mesmerized by it that they accidentally go off the road and into a ditch. Well, we hope not, but we really want them to see us. Which is why we also wear this …
Ultimate Survival Technologies Headlamp
A powerful little lamp and essential for those 5 a.m. workouts (see above; real people training before commutes etc.).
Expert runner’s hack: Wear this on your wrist!
It has a little clip that pivots to attach to the band, so instead of wearing it on your head (super annoying), clip it to your …
RoadID
Lets emergency responders know who you are. One of those great inventions that makes you wonder why no one thought of it sooner. A terrific way to soothe anxious spouses who may not be tickled about your planned solo century or 10K run down a remote road. There’s wrist models, shoe models, dog-tag models.
If you haven’t already been sucked in by the tales of horror on the RoadID website, proceed over there immediately and scan the story at the top of the page. You’ll be clicking “buy” before you know it.
Don’t leave home without one!
Some places where you DON’T need to spend a lot of money:
Headphones. We’ve tried a lot of different types, but in the end, it comes down to just a pair with a clip that goes over the ear.
Armbands. At this point, we’ll take any old band that will fit our increasingly huge phones.
What’s your favorite gear? Tell us below!
Tread carefully: Seven ways to stay safe with kids and exercise equipment
Warning: This guy is a professional dancer and choreographer so DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME!
We know many of you Gmappers are from northern climes (thanks, Google Analytics!), and because you are fitness-minded health nerds like us, you often use a treadmill or other equipment when it’s cold and crummy outside. To keep your kids safe around these things, we want to pass on a few tips we recently learned the hard way here at Gmaps World Headquarters.
Don’t worry, everyone’s OK now, but there was an unfortunate incident a couple of months ago in which our energetic little boy snuck into the garage and decided to see how fast he could go on the treadmill. One tumble later and he had a pretty big piece of skin scraped off his neck.
During our trip to the doctor, we were surprised to learn that many children are hurt when they try to play on exercise equipment. So now, we take precautions and make sure the kids know that the treadmill is not a toy.
Here’s some other things you can do.
- Put a mirror in front of your equipment so that you can see whether one of your children is coming up behind you while you’re exercising. Turns out many injuries happen when children are attracted by the movement of the machine, try to touch it and their fingers or hands get caught.
- Unplug machines when you’re not using them.
- Remove the safety key and hide it from your kids.
- Buy a cover and put it over the equipment so kids aren’t tempted to play on it.
- Lock the door to your exercise room or use a childproof gate.
- Keep the cords on safety keys looped out of the way. Do the same with blind cords that are near the equipment so kids aren’t tempted to climb on the equipment and grab them.
- If you’re in the market for a machine, look for one with safety features, such as locks on elliptical steps that must be removed before you can use the machine.
We love our fitness equipment, but it pays to be cautious! No more neck scrapings!
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