Since my sophomore year of high school, I’ve been an off and on runner. Some months I’d make it out five days a week, others I’d miss completely. After slimming down quite considerably and getting in the routine of regular exercise, something would come up and then I’d get out of routine and miss the gym and track for several days, weeks or months at a time.

I’d always heard that keeping a log of your progress is a great way to stay on task and improve things. In high school my weight training routines were assigned by the coach and as for running, I just ran as far as I could and left it at that. When I started college, I “took a year off” so to speak, and when I started working out again, I tried keeping track of my workouts on paper. Unfortunately, I’m rather disorganized and this didn’t last long. I then tried a piece of software called “Crosstrainer” but it wasn’t free and I stopped using it after a while.

A couple of years ago, a friend told me about a website that would allow you to measure the distance of your outdoor runs using Google maps. This was a great help, because I could figure out how far I was running. A few months later, I stumbled across Runstoppable, which allowed you to not only measure your routes, but to save multiple routes and log your runs. This was great, and I used it for several months. However, development on the site was slow to non-existent and there were a few bugs in the system.

Yesterday I was browsing around after being slightly annoyed with Runstoppable when I discovered a new site, RunningAHEAD. After completing the sign up (completely free), I entered all of my prior runs. I was impressed with the fit and polish of the site, the flexibility, and the features. Not only can you log runs, you can log weight training routines, biking routes, swimming, and other types of exercises. There is a myriad of data that can be entered for each activity, and a nice array of stats to keep you encouraged and help set new goals.

For now, I’ll be using RunningAHEAD to keep track of my activity. I would like to see a few new features, such as the ability to set and track goals and to compete with other users. If they were to develop a Facebook app that would allow you to challenge your friends to various activities (such as the first person to run fifty miles), I would be extremely excited… but for now, the site serves all my needs quite nicely and seems to be under active development. I’d say this is a must see for anyone involved in athletics or personal fitness.