THAT'S AMORE

The past few years for Valentine's Day, I led a group run that spells out something related to that over-commercialized event.  The first year it was "LOVE", the following it was also "LOVE" but packed into a neat little square, in the style of that famous Robert Indiana sculpture.  Last year, it was "I {heart} U", where the heart symbol was where the {heart} is.  A Facebook memory reminded me, belatedly, that this year it should be "xoxo".  I said "belatedly" because I totally forgot about it and already designed the route to spell "amore", the Italian word for love.  It could have been the Spanish word "amor" but because of that Dean Martin song I went with "amore".  The little pun about "a moray" (eel) and "amore" is one of my favorites, so "amore" it is.

The route makes no use of any special skill with pausing and unpausing of GPS watch or smartphone app.  I am tempted to throw in one, though, to make the top of the "r" better show the arch at the top of that letter.  It'll be an optional thing.  If you don't do it, the letter still looks like an "r".

9:30 A.M. Saturday 15 February 2020
Bartel-Pritchard Square
Brooklyn, NY

We'll walk to the green dot on the "a", without activating watch or smartphone app, then start from there.  Event is open to the public, so do come if you are in the neighborhood.  I'll be on the traffic circle of Bartel-Pritchard a little before 9:30.

KAMAL CHAOS

From time to time, when I go for a run I try to spell out a word or two.  Or even a small picture.  It is called Route Art.  Other runners do it too, some do epic work that take days and require marathon distance; others, not so.  I specialize in words and my latest effort was supposed to be Kamal, for a fan of my cartoon drawings.  Some years ago he and I worked for the same corporation.  I usually use the Strava app on my smartphone but have to switch to Runkeeper because of the First-World Problem detailed below*.  It's not quite the same using Runkeeper to "write" the word.  I use this trick to cut through a city block, by making use of the Pause and Resume function.  With Strava, when I press Pause the app simply stays so, the Resume button is right whenever I needed it.  With Runkeeper, once the activity is paused, the app seems to go haywire.  There is no Resume button to press!  I would have to "kill" the app by scrolling through the list of active apps and swipe up on Runkeeper.  A very scary feeling!  Like when a certain app in Windows freezes and you have to go to Task Manager to kill the process.  With Windows, that means losing whatever work you were doing.  Luckily, that's not the case with Runkeeper, as I can resume the run once the app is re-launched.  But it shouldn't be that way.

Perhaps because of the awkward way Runkeeper works, or NOT work with my artsy way of running, I miscalculated and ran a block long for the letter K in Kamal.  From the corner of Bath and Bay 35th, I should have run to Benson and Bay 32nd, not Bay 31st.  I also realized shortly afterward that I also forgot to write the bottom of the letter a, the one right after K.  I usually go back and correct one mistake, but two mistakes is too much for me.  I'll just try the run another day.

*When it comes to workout tracking app, Strava is the king of the hill.  It is so popular with runners and cyclists that the phrase Strava or it didn't happen came into being.  In other words, if you cannot show your activity as recorded in Strava, then people may not believe that you actually did it.  There is another app/web site called Relive that makes a little movie out of Strava activities.  It's especially satisfying to watch when the run spells out a word or draws a picture.  Unfortunately, there is some disagreement between Strava and Relive over the use of user data and Strava stopped allowing Relive from pulling data from Strava's users.  Other apps, such as Runkeeper, still work with Relive but it's just not the same.  I told you it's a First-World Problem.

"PARK" ART-RUN WITH A TWIST

A week from today I'll lead a run that spells out the word "PARK", but with a twist.  In place of the letter "A" is the logo of the Prospect Park Alliance.  I made a test run some weeks ago and the result is shown below.  I learned some lessons and they were applied to the Gmap-Pedometer link at https://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=7218671

There is a Facebook event to RSVP but you will need to ask to join the PPTC Members Discussion group, https://www.facebook.com/events/1463953043734534/.  If you don't have a Facebook account, or rather not join the group, simply show up at the side of The Picnic House at 9 AM on Sunday April 8, 2018.  That would be the left side when you face the building from the road.  Note that the word is spelled backward, starting with K and so on, so that when it's done we'll be near some businesses for coffee and such.

The better-designed map in Gmap-Pedometer above saves a side trip to the edge of the park to connect the R and the "A".  Also, the "A" is better executed with no extra lines on the left side.  When I did the run, the Green Market was in full bloom and there was only narrow path to go between the park and the arch.

Here is very wordy instruction for making R and K.

Start at the bottom left of the letter K, which is the side of The Picnic House. Follow the road to a T intersection then go right until you hit another T intersection then trace your way back to the other T intersection. Note that as there is no street corners like when we run on the street, I try to make use of the road intersections as often as possible.

Go up to the next intersection but don't actually touch it. I want a little gap between the top of the K and the bottom of the R. Again trace your way back to the T intersection. Make your way diagonally across the meadow. You should finish at another T intersection. The K is done!

To make the R, make your way across the meadow again, also diagonally to another T intersection on the other side. First do the bottom of the R by going down toward the top of the K, but don't actually arrive at the intersection because I believe the letters look better if they don't actually touch each other. Turn around and go up the road, follow the curve to form the top of the R as well as the right side. Again look for another T intersection then make your way across the meadow one last time. Go up the right side of the R one more time toward Grand Army Plaza.

I love serifs and probably will make them for the K and the R in the actual run.  Just stick with me if you want it done.

"A" is a bit more challenging because a few times it involves stopping the watch and resuming it.

So we finished the R should have traced our way back to the top right corner of the R. Take the path that goes under West Drive toward Grand Army Plaza. Where the letter P is on the map, pause your watch/app then run through the arch, past the fountain, all the way to Plaza Street East. The letter R on the map means you resume the watch/app. Run back toward the arch but along Plaza Street West. Don't cross the street to the side of the Green Market. Instead, go to the fountain, then pause the watch/app again. Run to Plaza Street West and Lincoln Place then resume. Run back to the arch one more time, along Plaza West but this time go as far east of the plaza as you can. Go across the street back into the park to where the letter P is and pause. One more time run through the arch, past the fountain, and onto Plaza Street East, but a little distance off the other point you made earlier. Resume watch/app. Run back to the arch along Plaza Street East. Do not cross the street to the Green Market. Instead go to the fountain and pause watch/app. Run to Plaza Street East and Butler Place then resume watch/app. The really difficult A is finally done!

Run along Plaza Street East to Vanderbilt, turn right to go up Vanderbilt to St. Marks Avenue. Turn right to go along St. Marks then turn right into Underhill Avenue. From Underhill, turn right into Park Place. Go past Vanderbilt a few step and stop watch/app. The whole thing is done!

To have a rounder letter P, do not wait until you are actually at the corner of Underhill and St. Marks to turn. Instead, run on the northern side of St. Marks and start crossing St. Marks when you are about the length of three cars from the corner. Likewise, don't start going straight down Underhill after making the turn. Run to the western side of Underhill and aim for the middle of the block. Execute similar maneuver for the turn at Underhill and Park Place.

SET IN SUNSET PARK

What a great feeling it is once you are resolved to do something and make modifications to your plan to achieve the final outcome.  So I decided I would walk if I have to, instead of running, just to complete my run-mapping of Brooklyn.  Running is more interesting but not always optimal, like after a meal.  Just a few days ago I churned out "Slope", for Park Slope, after a brunch with the track club.  Today I was in the neighborhood of Sunset Park and had a little time for running.  Not enough to do the entire "Sunset Park", or even the word "Sunset", but that is not a problem.  I am already stitching together the map in Photoshop, no harm to do one syllable at a time, like "set" as in "Sunset".  "t" didn't come out a straight as it should but it's beyond my control.  I guess at different time of day the satellite can be uncooperative.  Perhaps when I stitch "set" together with the other syllables it won't look so bad.

HAPPY NEW YEAR - BROOKLYN RUN-MAPPING RETURNS

Happy New Year!  I didn't declare it but deep down I know I want to resume blogging.  There should be only so much Facebooking one can do.  Be more of a content producer, not just a mere Liker and Bait-Clicker.  Without much further ado, here's a topic close to my heart, running and spelling out the neighborhoods of Brooklyn!  I prefer to call it Run-Mapping!

I should have known better but as I was done with the areas close to where I live, things get more challenging.  I have this weird rule about running - no driving to the place to run.  In other words, I should not drive x miles out to some place just to run around.  I guess it has to do with my strong dislike of driving.  If I am to complete this run-mapping of Brooklyn nabes, sooner or later I'll have to drive to where I want to run.  Until such time, I'll make the most of my travel.

Late in December I ran to Marine Park just to spell "Park".  Marine Park is about 5 km from me so spelling the whole "Marine Park" was not possible time-wise.  Lately on these runs I have one or two phone apps to track my "writing".  At one time I even thought if not for this run-map project, I probably can retire my Garmin GPS watch.  The apps work the same way with regards to pause and resume, so I can use them to virtually cut through city blocks to make letters like K and R with their pesky diagonal lines.  When they actually work as they are supposed to, that is.  On the "Park" run, they didn't.  Both Strava and MapMyFitness totally miss the P and then went crazy the rest of the run.  Luckily, I did have the trusty Garmin, even though the lack of a rectangular city grid threw me off my course.  As shown below, "Pa" is a big disappointment, even to a non-perfectionist like me.  The "a" is too far away from its neighbors and "r" looks too much like an "n".  I should have done my usual virtual trespassing in making the diagonal lines in "k".  I use the picture in the map anyway but deep down I know I will re-run that route to make a better word.

Even though I am a member of the Prospect Park Track Club, I don't go to Prospect Park that much.  Living far south almost in Coney Island, it's a bit of a trip for me.  But I do go there from time to time and I should take advantage of those trips to finally add Park Slope and neighbors to my map.

On New Year's Day, I volunteered as a backup time-keeper for the Club's Harry Handicap race, held in Prospect Park.  After the race, I had some food and was in no shape to run so I did the next best thing to spell out "Slope" - I walked.  It was not as interesting as running but for these far-flung places I just have to make the best of my time.  Again, MapMyFitness screwed up but Garmin Forerunner again saved the day.  I gladly used the picture in the big map although there are many more street blocks I need to capture to make the map truly continuous.

Given the annoying changes Garmin make to its web site, I should hurry up and run more neighborhoods sooner before some changes render my techniques useless.  Wish me luck! 

WELCOME TO BAY RIDGE ETC

Welcome to Bay Ridge and Dyker Heights, the two neighborhoods I recently added to my Brooklyn GPS map.  The map really needs to be expanded to include other neighborhoods but work has kept me busy.  I know, I know, Manhattan Beach still does not have its beach and Bath Beach should be further to the west.  So many nabes, so little time.

I must note that Bay Ridge was somewhat challenging in that its east-west streets are wider than the north-south ones.  I ended up using lots of iTrespassing to make the lowercase letters half-a-block wide.  It was a decision I made while out running.  In the planning stage, I was going to use the entire block's width, thus would not have enough width to spell Ridge, so I started the e in Dyker Heights and it unfortunately overlaps the D in Dyker.  Another word to re-write some day perhaps...

GWRITING GALLERY

My gwriting has happened faster than I can blog about them, so here's a little gallery of what I made in recent days.  Also collected here are rules and tips about gwriting.

• Unless you write in separate runs, everything is connected.  A separate run is when you reset the GPS watch.
• Try to keep the connection between letters at the bottom of the word.  This means you sometimes need to go up and down a letter a few times, e.g. making the uppercase N while going from left to right you would be done at the upper right but you want the next letter start at the bottom so you have to go back down.
• If you make a mistake just trace you way back.  In the big picture, the mistake may not be so bad.
• Uppercase letters done over a 2x2 grid look great, but you'll need to run longer distance.
• On the other hand, lowercase letters done over a single block are not bad either.  For "a" and "e", or other characters that have lines going through the block, there is no need to actually trespass private properties, just iTrespass.
• iTrespass relies on the fact that the path is draw as a series of lines between two points.  To draw the "a", ideally you would start from the overhanging part on the left, go over to the right side, pause the watch a third of the way down, then go to the left, about a third of the way up unpause the watch.  A line would then be drawn from the right side to the left side.  The GPS won't know that you made the long way around the block.    To finish the letter, run back to the right side, past the pause point.

For the first day of "May Run Every Day Challenge" hosted by "I  < 3 To Run"

Finger. 

For a good friend.  The thing on the right is supposed to be two concentric circles and the thing at Stillwell Avenue and 28th Avenue is supposed to be a diamond.

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

LUKE GROUNDWALKER

For the longest time, my runs are out and back and always a different route from day to day.  I have five or so different routes to choose from and it's nice to have the change of scenery, from waterfront to boardwalk then residential etc.  However, lately, I've made exceptions to my routine.  I pretty much run in my neighborhood, about 3.2 km out and back as if I am a bird, but the actual distance usually comes out to more than 10 km.  How?  I've been experimenting with GPS writing, or gwriting for short.

As a runner wears a GPS watch go about with his running, his path is recorded and can be viewed on a map.  Usually it's just a straight line out and back, or maybe a loop.  But a lot can be done beyond the line and the loop.  I originally found out about gwriting from seeing some route traced out in the shape of a heart, around the time of Valentine's Day.  As an Apple fan boy, my first thought was the Apple logo, but I never tried to do it.  Instead, one day on the futbol fields of Calvert Vaux Park I tried to spell "NYCRUNS", that little race management company that puts out small foot races with a community feel.  I used the Charity Miles app and was able to pause and resume as I went from letter to letter.  Not bad for a first time, but I got the letters for "RUNS" so close together.  The trouble with trying to gwriting on an open field is you have less reliable points of reference.  I thought I used so and so marker on the field but by the time I got back I didn't walk straight and wrote some letters too closely.

The very first time I gave gwriting a try.  It was not too shabby considering I did not use any exact reference points.

The next time I try gwriting the letters were "PPTC", short for Prospect Park Track Club, which I am an active member of.  Appropriately enough, I wrote the letters on Long Meadow of the park itself.  Again, without a good point of reference the letters did not come out perfect.

Appropriately, I tried to spell "PPTC", for Prospect Park Track Club, on Long Meadow of Prospect Park.  Only if the T was not so close to the P.

Some day later I tried to spell "NEWTOWN", my high school in Elmhurst, Queens, New York, in my own neighborhood of Bath Beach, Brooklyn.  Ideally I should do it in the school's neighborhood, but I live quite a drive away and I don't like to combine driving with running.  Unlike writing in an open field, the rectangular nature of the street grid posed an extra challenge.  Also, like the other attempts, the writing appears to be upside down when viewed on a map, with north pointing up.  No problem, I'll try to write better on the next run.  The only down side is I'll be stuck with running in Bath Beach for the time being, no scenic waterfront view.  Starting with this run, I used my GPS watch, which has much better battery life compared to Charity Miles running on the Samsung Galaxy S smartphone.  The one big downside with the GPS is that pausing and resuming do not work as I expected.  A straight line would be drawn from the pause point to the resume point, so I basically have to write continuously.  For some letters I just have to run back and forth along a stroke so to avoid having extra lines.  When there's no choice, I try to keep the extra lines at the bottom of the letters.

"Upside down" NEWTOWN, the first time I tried to "spell" my high school's name.

With today's run, along Bath Avenue and 86th Street and the streets in-between, from Bay 41st Street to Bay 19th Street, I got so much closer to the perfect NEWTOWN.  On earlier runs I used Benson Avenue and Harway Avenue/Cropsey Avenue and had to run around the bus depot at 25th Avenue because the depot took up two blocks.  Using Bath and 86th left the depot out of my path.  Ideally all the letters should be uppercase or all lowercase, but the street grid and time limit do not allow the luxury.  Making the N lowercase solves the issue of the diagonal stroke.  Instead of running two avenues, I can extend to three avenues, but then I will have to cover even more distance.  Not that I cannot cover the greater distance, but I am a slow runner and there is only so much time I can devote to running each day.  For example, the E in NEWTOWN should be wider but by then I was supposed to head back to pick up dinner that my mother already called in to the restaurant.

One thing I enjoyed immensely is that I actually spelled the letters backward as I wrote them, so that they appear right-side up on the map.  I live near the end of NEWTOWN, so instead of running some distance out and spell from left to right, I spelled it backward.  I still underestimated the letter widths and T came out bad, but there's always another run in the future.  In the mean time, take a look at how the route is traced out at

http://connect.garmin.com/activity/289689808

Go to the Player view and click the Play button.  The route is pretty flat, I think the change in altitude is wrong, or probably just me raising my watch arm.

Close-up view of my GPS NEWTOWN.

From far away, it still looks like NEWTOWN, even though the T should be wider.