How I plan a route

Every walk starts twice. Once at the car park, and once a few evenings earlier with a map open and a rough idea of how far is too far. This is the second half of that: the tools I use to turn “somewhere in the Peak District” into a file on my watch.

¶Plotting the route

Plotaroute does the first draft. It snaps to paths on Ordnance Survey mapping, so a route follows a right of way rather than cutting a hopeful straight line across a field boundary that turns out to be a wall. The elevation profile is the part I actually look at: total ascent tells you what kind of day it is far better than distance does.

The rule I have settled on is that the profile decides the plan, not the mileage. [TODO: your own rule of thumb here. Something like “anything over Xm of ascent and I halve my speed estimate”.]

¶Fixing the route afterwards

A first draft is never right. gpx.studio is where it gets tidied: trimming the drive to the trailhead off the front, merging two files into one day, dragging a leg onto the path you meant rather than the one the router preferred.

It runs in the browser, it is open source and it does not want an account, which for a job that takes four minutes is exactly the right amount of software.

¶Checking the weather properly

MWIS is the forecast that matters. Written by forecasters who go out in it, and it tells you what the wind is doing at height rather than what it is doing in the valley, which is the difference between a good day and turning back at the ridge.

[TODO: the day the valley forecast and the summit forecast disagreed, and what happened.]

¶Carrying the map

OS Maps on the phone, with the area downloaded before leaving the house. The offline downloads are the whole subscription as far as I am concerned: the map you can see is the one already on the device.

On the watch, WorkOutDoors draws a real vector map with the route on it, which no other Apple Watch app does properly. Footpath handles quick planning on the phone when the route is a change of mind rather than a plan.

Paper and a compass still come too. [TODO: say something honest here about how often you actually take a bearing.]

¶On the bike

Same route, different device. The Garmin Edge 1040 takes a GPX straight from Garmin Connect and the mapping is good enough to follow something you have never ridden, which is the test.

¶Afterwards

Everything lands in Strava and gets pulled back out by the importer that feeds the activities on my about page. HealthFit handles the export side of that for the numbers Apple Health keeps to itself.

¶What I would tell someone starting

[TODO: three or four lines. The one tool you would keep if you could only have one, and the mistake you made early on.]