If you are fairly new to running or are training for your first race, you may be at a loss for how to best track your progress with regards to distance, pace etc. I’ve been asked by a few people on the best way to track progress and log training for newbies. After all, if you’ve only been running for a few weeks and aren’t looking to win any races any time soon, dropping 300-400 dollars on a Garmin or other sports watch doesn’t make much sense.

Step one of finding a good training accessory doesn’t have to go much further than your phone… if you own an iPhone, Blackberry, Droid or other GPS enabled device. After some serious searching and recommendations from some hardcore runners, I came up with a list of some of the best apps out at the moment for people who are looking to keep track of their pace, mileage and routes.

iPhone/iTouch (to be as completely trite as possible) yes, there’s an app for that!
RunKeeper – RunKeeper won an open web award for best mobile application and seems to be one of the bigger favorites in the running community. The application loads up your runs to RunKeeper’s site, will keep a log and you can set it to auto-tweet your runs for you. ($9.99 – there’s also a free version you can use as well)

TrailGuru – Trail Guru comes with a neat visualization that integrates with google maps that you can share with your friends. There is a map building feature that is also searchable which helps users find other routes near them.

MapMyRun –This is one of several applications by iMapMyFitness (they have a cycling application as well). Easy to use interface and it will also do push notifications to your social networks.The generated stats and pages could use a facelift but the amount of data reported makes it good for all intensive purposes plus it’s FREE.

MotionX-GPS – This is a really cool application for people who want to be able to share their location with friends and family during a run. Waypoints will appear farther apart when you’re moving faster. Your friends and family can also track your position directly from the Facebook app interface. (2.99 and there is also a LITE free version as well.

BLACKBERRY
GPSed – This application is very similar to MotionX-GPS where you can have live tracking broadcasted to your social networks, map intergration and live mapping points during your run.

Allsportgps – Maps your progress and uploads your run results to the application’s portal Trimble Outdoors.

ANDROID
Runstar – free droid application that lets you share your run information, set monthly goals and track your progress. Interface is very slick and easy to use.

Instamapper – a Google map intergration which lets you embed your route on your blog or Facebook profile. They save up to 100,000 locations per device which you can also organize into tracks and export!

For more: New York Times