This is a series of posts about what it’s like to use the system after designing for it all this time. See previous posts on Setting Up and Working Out and Sharing Results.

On a beautiful Saturday morning a week ago I decided to run near the Charles River. I like running near the river because there’s a wonderful breeze that comes off the river  balancing against the heat of the sun. I went to Manage > Routes and mapped out the route I took, which came to a little over 2 miles over the course of about half an hour.

I went back to my Dashboard and clicked into the Plan Tracker on workout #3 to go to the details of that workout.

From there I selected the Route view and opened up my Routes List to locate the route I had just drawn and saved.

It immediately applies the route I selected to my workout, as can be seen with the name of the route selected displaying next to the Route view icon in the upper right hand corner, and also loads the saved route into my current view.

I zoomed in to a particular segment on my path, and when I hovered over a point I had drawn it showed me the cumulative distance at that point. There are also automatic mile markers in a purple outlined balloon along the path as well for reference.

I can also hide the tool bar at the top of the map to gain more visible space on the map.

I ended up covering another half a mile after I completed workout #3 before getting home. I captured that as a free workout separately because I wanted to get credit for the additional half mile (hey, every little bit counts!).

I could have arrived back at home more closely to the end of the workout by just listening to the miCoach Pacer narration. For plan workouts it will narrate the percent completion at 25%, 50% and 75%, so I could have turned around and doubled back at the half way point. But I like my scenery to change, so I try not to do a straight double back if I can. Now that I have a sense of how far it is to the river, and how long it takes me to run that distance, I can plan to do other workouts that are around the same length using a similar route. I have a pretty good sense of how much I can deviate from that path now and still make it home in about the amount of time it takes to do the workout. I look forward to the next beautiful day so I can do this all over again!