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This year I’ve joined with Hamilton Area Trail Runs to do the NJ River to Sea Relay on Saturday, August 4, 2012. Seven runners will trek 92 miles across New Jersey from Milford to Manasquan. This event is a lot of fun.

The team is running to raise money to help Thea Danze and other children affected with brain tumors.  The goal is $2,500 and we need your help. Thea, now age 5, lives in Robbinsville with her parents, Trisha and Jeff, and her baby sister, Lilly. In October of 2007, Thea was diagnosed with hydrocephalus and a brain tumor. She was just 4 months old. She underwent 3 brain surgeries that first week, including a nine-hour operation to resect the tumor. They got about 50%. A few days later, she suffered a stroke that left her with right-sided hemiparesis and a long road of therapy.

To date, Thea has had 43 months of chemotherapy, countless MRIs, several hospitalizations and hundreds of hours of PT, OT and speech therapy. But she is one of the lucky ones. Despite all the vomiting and hair loss, her side effects, thus far, have been pretty minimal compared to many other kids with brain tumors. Many other families are not so lucky. Please read more about Thea’s and the funraising effort Thea’s star of hope and if you are moved by her story, please make a donation: http://www.giveforward.com/theasstarofhope

You can also read more about the Hamilton Area Trail Runs “Run for Thea” here: http://www.hamiltonareatrailruns.com/run-for-thea.html

Thank you in advance!

I wanted to draw running routes in google maps that I could follow during the legs of the Ragnar Chicago relay race I was part of this past weekend. However, it was not intuitive to me how to do this with Google Map Maker. Fortunately, I am an avid user of gmap-pedometer. So, I drew my routes using the “draw route automatically” feature for runners and bicyclists. This is a tremendous time savings feature. The only problem is that gmap-pedometer is not a mobile-friendly website, and I would be running with my iPhone. So, I really wanted the routes to show up in a mobile-friendly app. Google Maps works well on the iPhone, so I simply had to export the gmap-pedometer data into Google Maps.

I exported the routes from gmap-pedometer as GPX files (using the great bookmarklet script from http://www.elsewhere.org/journal/gmaptogpx/#).  Google maps expects KML files though, not GPX files.

So once I saved the GPX file, I uploaded it to the very helpful and detailed GPS Visualizer and was able to create a KML file.

Using the KML file, I was able to import the route into Google Maps (within the My Maps section, after logging into Google). One note: turn off Waypoints on the GPS Visualizer. Select “None” in the “Waypoint Options” section of the form.