GWRITING - CHARITY MILES

GPS-writing, or gwriting for short, makes running even more interesting, but having just a rectangular grid to work with is challenging.  I recently made some improvements to the process.  Avenue blocks are longer than street blocks so from now on I will allot at least two street blocks to the width of a letter.  The letter i, of course, is an exception.  Another improvement I started to implement is to make use of the fact that the path is generated as a series of lines between points.  Not just any line, but a straight line between two points, which as any math-literate person knows, is the shortest distance.  I call this technique iTrespass.  For those letters that require diagonal strokes, such as Z or N, I can make use of iTrespass to have a nice line cutting through city blocks without ever really trespassing anyone's properties.  Another use for iTrespass is in dealing with the requirement that the letters have to be connected.  To minimize the unnecessary lines, I keep the extra lines at the bottom of the word.  To even further keep the extra lines out of the picture, I would go below the word a little bit then use iTrespass to have the extra line running below the bottom of the word.

The first application of these new Gwriting techniques is the picture below, to show some love to the app Charity Miles.  It's really a composite of two different runs' screenshots off the Garmin Connect web site.  Because the words are not perfectly horizontal and the screenshots are rectangular in nature, additional screenshots were made to cover the void in the lower left corner.  Photoshop Element was used only to connect the pieces, no other photo manipulation was done.  iTrespass allowed me to create the letter "i" cutting through two city blocks.  Using iTrespass, I actually ran longer distances but what is a few extra kilometers between friends?

In a perfect world, I would have used the Charity Miles app itself to generate the path.  Alas, battery life on my Android Samsung Galaxy I stinks and would not last, so I stuck to my trusty Garmin Forerunner 210 watch.

Two runs, one purpose!

CHARITY

http://connect.garmin.com/player/293488523

MILES

http://connect.garmin.com/player/293109040