Meet the Mapmakers: Behind the creation of WalkJogRun

Editor's note: Meet the Mapmakers is a series highlighting the people who shape Google Maps Platform. Tune in as our Mapmakers offer their unique perspectives on the platform’s present and future, and share stories about their personal journeys.

In celebration of Google Maps Platform’s 20th anniversary, I sat down with Adam Howitt and Jeff Kenny, the founders of WalkJogRun. WalkJogRun, which was available from 2003 to 2018, was the first of its kind online platform and mobile app designed to help runners, walkers, and joggers track their routes and distances. Powered by Google Maps Platform, it allowed users to map out their running or walking routes on a digital map, calculate distances, and share those routes with a community of fellow runners. I first covered them in my personal blog, Google Maps Mania, back in 2005, and I’m thrilled to talk to Adam and Jeff again 20 years later about their groundbreaking fitness platform.

Q: How did you come up with the idea for WalkJogRun?

Adam: In 2003, I was living in Atlanta. A friend of mine said, “Hey, are you going to do the Peachtree 10k road race in Atlanta?” I said, “I don’t know how to train for that.” I’d never done one before, but I figured I could work something out. That was the genesis of this whole project — where do you run? 

Jeff: Adam later moved to Chicago in 2005 and joined the company where I was working, Duo Consulting. I think we literally sat across from each other. In September 2005, Adam showed me this very developer-y, no-front-end thing he had made, and I was like, “This is really cool,” but also, “This is the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.” I can’t let things be ugly, so I made a logo and threw some basic HTML around it to tidy things up. I literally said, “Happy birthday. I made this,” and he was like, “Oh my God.” And that was the first iteration of WalkJogRun.

Q: How did you go about building the first version?

Jeff: In the very first version, we used static images from MapQuest or Yahoo! Maps, which were the popular maps at the time.

Adam: I’d drive around in my car to make sure it was accurate. I’d drive the whole route I was planning to run so I could compare the GPS measurements with what WalkJogRun said the distance was.

Jeff: Adam would literally click on the scale on the map — like from zero to one mile — so the JavaScript would know how long a mile was. He obsessed over accuracy.

Adam: Yeah, for me, that was always the big thing — I wanted WalkJogRun to be as precise as possible, especially if users were going to rely on it.

Google Maps launched in February 2005, and over the next few months we reverse-engineered Google Maps so we could draw the map from it. This was before the Google Maps API existed. We figured our way around it, and then of course when the API came out, it made our lives so much easier. Jeff Kenny Co-founder of WalkJogRun

Q: What was one of the most memorable moments in the history of WalkJogRun?

Jeff: In September 2005, you [Mike Pegg] did a writeup of us on the Google Maps Mania blog. Then a few months later in December, a friend of mine texted me and said, “Hey, your WalkJogRun site is down.”

Adam: I thought the cleaners probably unplugged it, because it was running on a Pentium II in my closet that I’d turned into a Linux server. I got off the train, went back to my apartment near Wrigley Field, and checked — all the lights were blinking. Everything was plugged in.

Jeff: Then my friend texted me back and said, “Oh, you’re in the Wall Street Journal.” And then I realized, that’s why. Before that article, it was mostly just friends from word of mouth — maybe 10 to 20. They’d say, “Cool, Jeff and Adam are messing around with something neat.”

Adam: When the Wall Street Journal article hit, it jumped to 1,500 to 2,000 users an hour. Over the course of the day, I think it hit around 7,000 or 8,000. 

Jeff: What had happened was the Wall Street Journal had picked up your Google Maps Mania blogpost and done their own writeup, but they hadn’t told us. 

Adam: We probably would’ve received even more traffic if the server hadn’t crashed. I had already been tinkering with using a new virtual server, and after the crash we migrated everything out of my closet.

Q: How did you balance full-time jobs with late-night building?

Jeff: This was really the fun part. We’d finish our regular jobs, go home, say hi to our partners, grab some pizza, and then head to our WalkJogRun office near Wrigleyville.

Adam: We’d go until about midnight or later. I’d say, “I have an idea,” and we’d goof around and whiteboard stuff. “Let’s do this. What if we do that?” We kept updating it. We didn’t want to do it at work, so we had a safe space where we could leave things on the walls and return to them when we came back. We did a lot of mind-mapping, walking around, thinking of new features and directions.

Jeff: When we started this in ’05, I had a two-year-old, then another kid in 2006, and another in 2008. My wife was getting pretty annoyed — I’d come home at 1:30 AM.  There were a lot of late nights. But I just remember it being fun. Everything was so new and exciting. Having a very understanding wife was pretty important.

Q: Why was the iOS app a game-changer?

Adam: In 2009, we launched the iOS app. I’d seen Steve Jobs give several keynotes, and once I saw what people were building with iOS, it was a no-brainer — we could have maps on our phones. For me the promise of the WalkJogRun app on iOS was the GPS and accuracy, plus the power of the Google Maps API as the basemap. We spent a whole year testing it, running every route we could. I wanted it to be better than anything else out there.

Jeff: Once we had all the features we wanted, we launched it in the App Store for $5. We had 80,000 users using the iOS app.

Say you’re training and need to run a specific distance — you could literally plot it out in your neighborhood, see that it’s 3.5 miles, and go run. Before that, it was disjointed — you'd map it on your desktop, then go run it without seeing it again.

Q: How did WalkJogRun grow into a global community?

Adam: I started WalkJogRun because I didn’t know anyone running the race I signed up for, so I had no community. Over time, a core community formed in what we built and started sharing and mapping routes.

Jeff: Running 15 miles in Chicago is daunting if you don’t know where to go. So the ability to pull up a route for the distance you need — and trust it — was huge. Users could leave comments like “There’s a water fountain at mile four,” or “Watch out for the dog park here.” That was a feature our users asked for — adding comments — and it turned out to be really useful.

Adam: While I was in Chicago, I met Jenny Hadfield from Runner’s World. She was coaching people in Old Town. I went on a long run with her and talked her ear off. I asked if she’d be interested in creating training plans for WalkJogRun. That’s where “walk, jog, run” came from — very deliberate, thanks to Jeff. Whether you’re walking or jogging or running, we had five training levels for each distance. It was on the app and the website — no login needed. You could go through the plans and follow the guidance.

Q: Why did you decide to shut it down — and what came next?

Jeff: I'm the first to admit: 90% is timing. I started a company in ’95 that ended up helping me become an early adopter of this whole internet thing — back then people would say, “My nephew told me about this,” and I’d go, “Yeah, it’s legit.” We never really approached WalkJogRun like, “Let’s build a business out of this.” It was always, “Let’s make a really cool tool that we want to use ourselves.”

Adam: I joined Google in 2017, and I had to make sure there weren’t any conflicts of interest, so that was kind of the beginning of the end.

Jeff: We closed WalkJogRun in 2018. Our day jobs were making us more money than the side project. I had three kids, Adam has two sets of twins. Family life took over. I spent 16 years coaching youth sports, 11 of those on the Little League board. We had a lot going on. That conversation — “are we really shutting it down?” — was really difficult. But it was time.

Adam: We sent out an email letting our users know we were closing down, and we got an outpouring of responses: “Thanks so much for the service you provided. How much money per year do you need to keep it running? Have you considered Kickstarter? Have you tried to sell it on one of the footwear companies? I'm sure most of us would pay $10 to $30 per year without ads” It was really touching.

Jeff: One of the best things I got out of WalkJogRun was my friendship with Adam. Adam became my  lifelong friend. Absolutely. It was one of those things where we started out as co-workers, and I don't even refer to him as a former co-worker. I drove Adam across the country when he and his family moved to Boston. He's actually one of my kids' godfathers.

Adam: I stayed at Google for around seven years. Then, just recently when I turned 50, I was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's. I left Google last November, and now I’m working with the Alzheimer's Association — helping to destigmatize sharing diagnoses so people can get the support they need. I’m also lobbying to help pass key Alzheimer’s legislation in Massachusetts in 2025. It’s been a big shift, but an important one.

Q: What advice would you give to developers today?

Adam: It’s really easy to build an app today, but I’d urge engineers to understand what’s going on underneath. If you don’t know how it works, you won’t know what can go wrong. AI is amazing and can get you a prototype quickly — but then you have to ask: what are we doing? What could break? Keep asking that all the way through. If you only follow the happy path, eventually something will break and you won’t understand why.

Jeff: From my perspective — I started a company in ’95 and then did this with Adam — just go for it. I know it can sound privileged, but it wasn’t. I had college debt and no idea what I was doing. Don’t be afraid to have fun. WalkJogRun was never perfect when we launched. It was functional, and we built on it from there.

The younger generation (my oldest is graduating college this year) is so hard on themselves. Don’t be afraid to fail. We got it wrong plenty of times, but we came back and made it better. I’ll share advice I got from Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson from 37signals: don’t worry if someone else already does it. Open Google Maps and search for Italian restaurants. A dozen show up within three blocks — all doing the same thing. But they’re still in business. Do the same thing if you want to, just do it well. That really changed my mindset.

We didn’t set out to build something big. We just wanted to build something we wanted to use — and that took us further than we ever could have imagined.