Discovering New Walking Routes?

December 3, 2022 9:04 AM

I like to go out on daily walks for about 30 minutes or so and I am always treading the same route just for convenience. Is there an app that will help me get out of that rut and get me to randomly choose new streets to take?

I am imagining being able to set my home destination, and allowing it to create a route for a set time that would take me out and back again? (I generally listen to podcasts during my walk but would be intrigued if there was some entertaining element to the app that I could switch to).

posted by nanook to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (10 answers total)

Maybe one of those games that takes you out chasing virtual monsters in the real world (this was popular for a while but I forget the name of the brand) plus a timer to remind you to turn around after 10-20 minutes.
posted by aniola at 9:25 AM on December 3, 2022

Zombies, Run! is one example of above.
posted by oceano at 10:28 AM on December 3, 2022

Their website makes seem more complicated than it is but I’ve found the Strava app (a fitness tracker) shows you runs people have taken in a map so you can follow the same.

I enjoy using it when I travel.
posted by artificialard at 10:50 AM on December 3, 2022

I'm sure I remember an app to map the challenge of walking every single road, street, alley and close in your neighborhood...
posted by socky_puppy at 12:07 PM on December 3, 2022

OMG you are gonna love Randonautica.

Get a random walking route within a certain radius from your home. And also maybe find a gap in the matrix.
posted by missjenny at 4:24 PM on December 3, 2022

Socky_puppy is probably thinking of one of these two apps that will keep track of your walking routes if you wanted a challenge to walk every street in your city or similar: CityStrides and Street Ferret will connect to a Strava account (CityStrides also connects to Garmin, MapMyFittness, and Runkeeper) and log your routes.

You can also use something like Map My Run to work out a route to draw pictures or write words, my nephews requested the Creeper from Minecraft although to be honest it probably took me longer to plan a route to fit the streets than it did to run it, so not really what you're looking for. CityStrides and Street Ferret look like they have features that will help you find un-walked parts of your area, but neither will pre-plan a route for you.
posted by lemonade at 7:43 PM on December 3, 2022

Also here is a list of Zombies Run alternatives, maybe one of them fits the bill. Ingress is a game where you have missions and there are portals in your neighborhood to collect or something like that, it was too complicated for me to play while running but might fit walking nicely. Sort of like a more complex adult version of Pokemon I think although I haven't played Pokemon to compare.
posted by lemonade at 7:59 PM on December 3, 2022

That's it! I kept thinking: Pokemon? Can't be it! Wrong era! Finally figured it out. I was thinking of Pokemon Go.
posted by aniola at 8:22 PM on December 3, 2022

Ok definitely take a look at Ingress, find the 'missions' list, there is a list of missions with distance from where you are, then the mission looks like hitting a list of waypoints in that area. Be sure to look at the duration of the mission, because if it's 500m from you but has an hour duration, the points to hit are probably far apart. But if you pick a mission that is 2km away, that has like a 10 min mission, then 2km back home...something like that could be fun.
posted by lemonade at 10:19 PM on December 3, 2022

This map will show you what your radius is, if you live anywhere that google maps knows about. You can set your walking speed.
posted by aniola at 1:24 PM on December 4, 2022