distance nerd stuff
A project to teach myself agentic coding tools.
College Running Log
The life of a middle-of-the-road, D3 distance runner. Four years of paper training logs, transcribed and made interactive.
Strava Dashboard
The life of a middle-aged, suburban mom. All the data, none of the training.
What are these graphics?
College — Ring of Seasons
Four rings, one per academic year: innermost is 2003–04, outermost 2006–07. Each ring is a single year read clockwise from the top, starting in August, and its thickness at any point is the miles run that week.
Where nothing was logged the ring pinches to nothing. That is why the inner ring opens at the top — the log begins a few weeks into freshman fall — and why the outer one stops three‑quarters of the way round, at graduation in May 2007. There is no GPS in this era at all; it was a paper log, so the drawing is built from dates and mileage alone.
Strava — Route Grid
Forty‑eight real GPS tracks, one to a cell, drawn from every activity that recorded a route. Each is scaled to fill its own square, so a cell shows a route's shape, not its size — a two‑mile loop and a twenty‑mile ride are drawn just as large.
The picks are spread across sports in proportion to how often each one appears, and favor routes that fill a square rather than running off in a line. A few near‑straight cells survive that: those are genuine out‑and‑backs.
- run
- bike
- hike / walk
- snow
- everything else