A visualization of running routes in Bruges, Belgium

I was inspired by a blog post on FlowingData.com (http://flowingdata.com/2014/02/05/where-people-run) to plot latitude and longitude information of running paths I collected from people who upload their runs in the area of Bruges city.

This kind of geovisualization consists of three steps. First, I collected gpx-files of running routes in the Bruges area. For this area, I downloaded from MapMyRun.com a total of 563 available gpx-files.

Next, we need to extract the coordinates from the the gpx-files and put all routes in a data frame. To this end, I used the ReadGPX() function as document in a this blogpost of Nadieh Bremer (http://www.visualcinnamon.com/2014/03/running-paths-in-amsterdam-step2.html).

Finally, we can visualize the data with ggmap and ggplot2.