If you’re a relatively new Garmin Forerunner user or have yet to experience the full effect of Garmin Connect, this will blow your mind:

Say you’re tired of the same neighborhood you’ve been stomping for the past few weeks and are on the market for a new running route… Aside from some cool analytics features for pace, time splits, max/min speed and elevation change – you can also find cycling and running routes via other Garmin Connect users right off the site! If you live in a pretty populated city (Los Angeles for instance) you should be in for a treat.

Here are some easy to follow steps to get you started on finding some cool and local running routes:

From the Garmin Connect page click on the “Explore” tab. You will be taken to a search page where you can look up by keyword and location different activities from other Garmin Connect users. Filtering options include: activity, event type, distance and elevation.

It’s a very cool way to know what to expect when running a route (depending on notes + output). For example: I found a user who ran the trail at Elysian Park – one I’ve been meaning to check out. After clicking on the route I found out that there was a decent elevation gain – and am now able to figure out alternate routes if the distance is not what I’m looking to do (this person ran a 5 mile route).

From the looks of it, you cannot “friend” or “connect” with other Garmin Connect users (ironic). It would be cool to be able to connect with other Garmin users who are running the same routes (especially because you already know their pace). I doubt that Garmin would put much time or money into building out an online community from the possibilities their site presents. It is a really stellar opportunity for a developer to create a mashup app based on a geo-location game. Wishful thinking? Maybe?

Here are some other route finders for non-Garmin users:
SportsTrack
Walk Jog Run
Map My Run
Daily Mile

Take this with you on your new running route: