Last week, my iPod Mini became unusable by slow degrees. First, the armband disintegrated. Then, the headphones lost the connection to the right ear, except for intermittent scratchy bursts that occurred only when I had jacked up the volume to compensate. Then the battery slowly lost its ability to hold a charge: two miles, one mile, half a mile. It never died just as I was leaving the house, just long enough to make turning back kind of silly.

So I pretty much lost my will to run. Running is tedious. I need some kind of technology-based motivator to keep me interested.

Still, I persevered, and soon began to appreciate the sensation of running to the soundtrack of only the music of the spheres. The other day, I went running with Dog and had to take a roundabout route to avoid a bridge that would cause him to have a nervous breakdown. When I got back I wondered how far we had gone, and tried to add it up by my usual precision method of Googling up a local map, pinching my thumb and forefinger into the unhelpful distance supplied on the scale (2000 feet), and then counting up how many of those spaces fit into my route and dividing by the number of feet in a mile. This, I believe, is the method developed by NASA to calculate distance and trajectory for space missions.

But what’s good enough for NASA isn’t necessarily good enough for me, and I found myself thinking, “There’s GOT to be a better way to measure a running route.” And after a little Googling, I found WalkJogRun. It’s brilliant: not only can you plan your run and measure each leg with a few easy clicks, you can save your runs and view other people’s favorite routes in your area. Had I had access to this in San Antonio, I might not have ended up running the concierge-recommended “urban blight” trail.

It also lets you enter your speed and weight and calculate your likely caloric expenditure, provided you don’t stop mid-run for a beer.