Phoenix Exercises: Strava App Shows Where People Run, Walk, Swim

PHOENIX, AZ – There's been a lot of talk the past few days about how a fitness company's maps have inadvertently disclosed the location of secret United States military bases. The maps collect information from devices made by companies such as Fitbit and Garmin as well as cell phones.

The controversy started earlier this week when The Washington Post ran a story, "U.S. soldiers are revealing sensitive and dangerous information by jogging" that detailed how an Australian student discovered the map.

It turns out that Strava, a GPS tracking company that calls itself "the social network for athletes," has an interactive "Global Heatmap" showing where its more than 27 million subscribers walk, run, swim, cycle, and more.

While it turns out that some of the users are soldiers going for a jog in Kandahar and people jogging by a suspected CIA base in Somalia, many of them are your neighbors.

You can out an address in the map, and it will show you where people are exercising in your neighborhood.

You can see the skiers at Arizona Snowball, people hiking the Grand Canyon, students running the track at Arizona State, people bicycling by the Arizona Canal.

Strava says that people often use the map – which is not live but based on two years of data collected by the company – to develop their own exercise routes.

The company says that they collected information on 1 billion activities in which people covered 17 billion miles while exercising a cumulative 200,000 years.

So, check out where your neighbors work out and develop your own routine.

Image of the Global Heatmap courtesy Strava.