A Nice Run Along the Isar River

By Markus and Klaus, November 2006

The Isar river near Schäftlarn is a very nice place for running. The location is about 20 km south of Munich. We went there for a 10 km run and want you to participate and see how beautiful it is there.

Goal

Our goal was to try out the new Run.GPS program and use it for analyzing our training run.

Preparation

We had the map imported from Google Earth (a free tool from Google which has satellite images and maps for everywhere on earth). This was easy and took as about 5 minutes. You don't have to calibrate the map - this is done automatically by Run.GPS. Detailed information can be found in the manual.

The Run

Tour Summary A quick summary of the run: it's 10.13 km in total. It took us 1 1/2 hours and we were going at an average speed of 6.8 km/h (okay that's pretty slow but only because we had to search for the track several times).

Starting Point At the restaurant "Bruckenfischer" there's a big parking lot on the west side of the Isar. You have to pay 2 Euro for parking. You can start your training run directly at the restaurant. The image doesn't show the parking lot yet because it has been newly built :-). The white line embodies the way we arrived (by car). Since we had our Run.GPS turned on, this path was also recorded by instant trail mapping. The green dot is where we started and the red dot is where we finished. If you want to go there, here's a placemark for the "Bruckenfischer": you can use it either in Run.GPS or in Google Earth: bruckenfischer.kmz

Kloster Schäftlarn

Bruckenfischer

	"Bruckenfischer" The restaurant "Bruckenfischer" (the little building) is always worth a visit: good food, good prices and a nice place to sit. In May you can go to the "Isartaler Mailauf", a 10 km run with usually about 100 participants. See Mailauf West of the Bruckenfischer you can see the Isar river and east of it is the Isar canal. The Isar canal is currently refurbished, which is why we went to the bridge and watched there for some time (indicated by the little "pushup" pause symbols).
	Full Map This screenshot shows the full training map. The bright spots are the sandbanks of the Isar.
	What happened? We got lost. The Isar has just washed away the trail at position North 47°57'05.90' ' East 11°27'04.66' ' ... With some luck you can work your way through the forest here.
	GPS Since this was our first test run with Run.GPS, we were pretty curious if the track would be recorded correctly. We were taking a "Pocket Loox N500" PDA from Fujitsu-Siemens with built-in GPS. The Sirf III chip provided a good signal for the entire run, even when in deep forest.

The Isar river

Bridge over Isar river

Boat channel

	The Navigator The navigator tells you what direction to go when you're in the deep forest and have no clue how to get back or somewhere else. You can either select a destination point directly on the map or from the list of waypoints. Just plug in your earphones and you will get information about what direction to go, how far it is, your current speed, average speed, and other stuff. The instructions given are for example: "go 10, distance to waypoint 1.4 km" which means "go to 10 o'clock (i.e. turn left at an angle of 60 degrees)" (military language)
	Analysis The "Training" screen shows most of the training parameters like speeds, altitude, elevation, distance, and so on. It also computes the calories you got rid of. In our case we lost about 1150 kcal each so we could afford to go to the Bruckenfischer afterwards. The diagram can be adjusted by holding your styles for some seconds so the context menu appears. The section "Monitor" shows the current values of the GPS system.
	Training Plan for November 2006 This is our Run.GPS training plan for November. It shows both what shall be done and what already has been done. On the screenshot you can see our Isar run on Tuesday. For fun, we also saved the car journey going there and back.

Biker at Pupplinger Au

Goats enjoying the sun