But while ignoring spelling and grammar rules when texting your friends may be OK (honestly, though: it isn’t), once those pesky errors find their way into emails, articles and cover letters, they may cost you a good grade in school, not to mention a job.

YKWIM?

We hope the 11 infographics below, all of which focus on either grammar or spelling rules or common mistakes, will be both useful and a fun way to brush up on those skills.

Let’s get started with some Basic Grammar Rules

Getting a grip on good grammar infographic

15 Grammar Goofs That Make You Look Silly

15 Grammar Goofs That Make You Look Silly infographic by BlueGlass.

The Most Annoying Writing Mistakes

The Most-Annoying Writing Mistakes infographic

10 Hyphenation Tips

10 Hyphenation Tips infographic by grammar.net.

Quotation Marks and Punctuation

Quotation Marks and Punctuation infographic by grammar.net.

Common Rules for Capital Letter Usage

Common Rules for Capital Letter Usage infographic by grammar.net.

12 Most Misunderstood Words in English

12 Most Misunderstood Words In English infographic by grammar.net.

Words You Might Misuse

Words You Might Misuse infographic

Verbs and Their Prepositions

Verbs and their prepositions infographic

14 Mistakes With Prepositions

14 Typical Mistakes With Prepositions infographic by grammar.net.

Apostrophes

Apostrophes The Story of Bob and Muffin infographic by MKayMann.

Finally, one for fun: Eight Totally Necessary New Punctuation Marks

8 Totally Necessary New Punctuation Marks infographic by CollegeHumor.

Aleks Todorova is the editorial director at Visual.ly. She’s a stickler for proper grammar and spelling, but wishes the Morgan Freemark were real.

But here, wait staff at restaurants (along with those working in the kitchen, etc.) earn minimum wages – if not less than that – and it is generally accepted that they must rely on tips to make a living.

To gauge America’s opinions on tipping at restaurants, Visually partnered with SurveyMonkey Audience to gather feedback from over 500 U.S. adults. See what they told us in the infographic below. (General information on respondents is available here).

Restaurants Run on Tips infographic by anibalinfographics.

But for those who’ve come to love running – whether they just started going ’round the block last month or have been competing in their age groups for years – the marathon distance is the ultimate goal; a bucket list type of thing.

A marathon is long enough to challenge you physically and mentally and to test your endurance, spirit and heart, not to mention your love of and commitment to the sport. Do not fool yourself, in training you will cover many, many hundreds of miles. And so it is: when it comes to long distance running, the marathon has all the glory.

But in recent years, it isn’t the marathon that’s exploding in popularity among runners — it’s the distance that was once, perhaps deprecatingly, named “half” of a marathon.

There is nothing “half” in a half marathon, mind you. To run 13.1 miles is no small feat. But because it is, after all, twice shorter than a marathon and the training is arguably easier and less time consuming, the number of people finishing a half marathon distance has been growing much faster in recent years than those running and finishing the full.

Non-profit organization Running USA and Athlinks, an online database for race results, released its latest annual Half Marathon report earlier this week and, together with the same type of data for the marathon (out just a few weeks prior), we created the infographic below to visualize some of the most interesting data.

Battle of the Long Distance Races infographic by anibalinfographics.

Aleks Todorova is the Editorial Director at Visual.ly. She recently ran her third marathon and will run her 21st half marathon this Sunday. Follow her on Twitter.

Why? For one, many TV shows have twisty plots or complicated relationships that just beg to be laid out in a beautiful design. Since television is visual by its very nature, the visual aspects of those infographics are already there — and in many cases, the fans would appreciate them for that alone. But most importantly, let’s not forget that designers and data visualization professionals are people too — and like most of us, they have their favorite TV shows. When you create an infographic about something you enjoy, love or even obsess about, you will design not only with knowledge, but with heart as well.

Here are nine such visualizations.

1. A Graphic Tribute to Game of Thrones

Just in time for the much-anticipated Season 3 premiere, Nigel Evan Dennis brings us this stunning interactive visualization that will tell you pretty much everything you want to know about the show’s characters – without giving away the saucy plot lines (you should watch the show to see those for yourself — and read the books, if you truly want to understand everything that’s going on). Each character is illustrated in a minimalist – but very true to life – design and classified according to their house and faith, and there is an interactive timeline (shown above) for the show’s fans to peruse. (Click on the image below to launch the interactive.)

A Graphic Tribute To ‘Game Of Thrones’ infographic

2. The Supernatural Sprawl of True Blood

True Blood began as a love story between a vampire and a human telepath, with a bit of shifter sprinkled in. Then, with each new episode, more supernatural beings came into the mix: werewolves, werepanthers, demons, witches, mediums, ghosts… By Season 5, even the truest of Truebies could have easily lost count.

This visualization, aptly named The Supernatural Sprawl of True Blood, breaks down what type of creatures appeared in each single episode during the show’s first five seasons.

The Supernatural Sprawl of True Blood infographic by visually.

3.Lostalgic

Santiago Ortiz is one of the data vis community’s most respected professionals. His amazing work includes Pleiades, which visualizes Twitter communities, and the 7 sets Venn Diagram: an interactive visualization of seven colors, mixed to create 128 combinations.

But most impressive — particularly to fans of the cult TV show LOST — is his Lostalgic: an interactive visualization of the script of LOST in its entirety; every single character, episode, even word. The visualization has several functionalities, including a matrix of characters (sized based on their lines in a particular episode), a graph that maps out character relationships and even a “reenactment” option that will take you through the script, line by line. There is so much to do and explore here, LOST fans can get lost in this interactive for hours.

4. Walking Dead Zombie Kills

Even those of us who don’t watch the Walking Dead know that this show is about zombies — and killings. The infographic below visualizes zombie kills — very tastefully, too.

Walking Dead Zombie Kills infographic by cobradave.

5. Vampire Diaries: Surviving Death

The Vampire Diaries has a faithful following, overwhelmingly among the female demographic (especially teenagers and their moms). Luckily, infographic designer Michelle Calderon is a fan and created this visualization in the weeks leading up to the Season 4 premiere (the season is already under way).

Vampire Diaries: Surviving Death infographic by michelleink88.

6. Dexter’s Victims

Watching Dexter isn’t recommended if blood makes you squeamish. The killings are many, the blood is free-flowing. The infographic below, visualizing Dexter’s victims during the show’s first five seasons, should give you a pretty good idea of just how gory things can get:

Dexter’s Victims infographic by Dehahs.

7. Breaking Bad Periodic Table

“Periodic table” visualizations — other than the one created by Dmitri Mendeleev — are rarely successful and often downright cheesy. Hardly any data other than that in the Periodic Table of the Elements lends itself to a periodic table visualization. That is, unless you’re looking at the Periodic Table of Breaking Bad characters. It’s only fitting!

Breaking Bad Periodic table infographic

8. Mad Drinkers

What do the men (and women) of Mad Men do? Why, they drink. The Mad Drinkers interactive visualization captures the spirit of the show perfectly:

Mad Drinkers infographic

9. Relationships in Gossip Girl

Finally, one just for fun. Remember Gossip Girl? If you never watched that show, here’s how it goes down: not much happens over the course of six seasons, other than every single one of the main characters dating everyone else. The infographic below captures that perfectly, with just the appropriate amount of simplicity:

Relationships in Gossip Girl infographic

Aleks Todorova is the editorial director at Visual.ly. The Vampire Diaries is her favorite TV show – and she is not ashamed to admit it. She is often guilty of talking about it on Twitter, too.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. In fact, when done right, visual storytelling can add immense value to your marketing strategy or PR campaign — or it could play a key role in impressing your manager with that “visual” performance report and help you get a promotion.

Communicating a message through an infographic or data visualization can reach more viewers and have a stronger impact than doing it the old-fashioned way, with words, numbers and spreadsheets. We recently talked about these advantages with a case study of A Tale of Two Cows, a Visual.ly infographic that has been seen by more than 105,000 people on our site alone and hundreds of thousands more across other platforms.

But if it isn’t done right — or if it’s approached with the wrong expectations — visual storytelling can, at best, fail to produce the results you want.

The problem is that many people approach visual storytelling with unreasonably high or simply wrong expectations. So let’s take a look at some of the common misconceptions about visual storytelling — and how those can be worked out.

1. The groundbreaking/ viral story you want your data to tell just isn’t there

So you have lots of data generated by your company (or its users) and would like to see it all laid out in a beautiful, ground-breaking, viral infographic. The problem is, the data may not support the story you want to tell. Your company sales may not be going up as steeply as you’d want, or that year-to-year change may look flatter when presented with a line chart than you thought it would.

The biggest risk? Giving in to the temptation to fudge the visualization by playing with the scale or even changing the data itself. Don’t do it! Even if no one finds out (and these days, chances are good someone might), you will know forever that the story you gave the world was wrong.

2. You have a great story in mind… but can’t find the data to support it

This happens often when you have a specific storyline in mind and very little flexibility around it. So you set out to do some research and find the data that will help you craft that story… but have difficulty finding exactly what you need.

First, please understand this: visual storytelling doesn’t work like advertising. You can’t just film a bunch of actors playing happy family, dancing in an SUV, and bam: viewers will believe that you have the safest and coolest car on the market. If you don’t have the data to support the story you are trying to tell, you can’t really create a credible infographic about it.

The biggest risk: too often, clients in this situation simply withhold data and try to be as vague with their claims as possible. This results in a non-data visualization, simply text on an image. It is very easy for people to see through these non-stories, and hardly ever results in a successful product.

3. You’ve got too much data and want to visualize all of it

Got big data? Good. You want to visualize all of it in one infographic? Could be your worst idea ever.

On the one hand, you could end up with a beautiful visualization, something that looks like this or this.

But you could also find yourself with a bunch of indecipherable charts or tables and end up blaming the designer for failing to create something beautiful out of all the data you gave them. In reality, if you spend some time parsing through your data and practicing the art of exclusion, you’d be gaining so much more than the time (and possibly resources or money) that you spent.

4. Your expectations are too high

Depending on your budget, commissioning an infographic or data visualization project can seem expensive. And because infographics are still relatively new in content marketing, you may have had to convince your manager to come up with a budget you didn’t previously have. So no one can blame you for wanting an end product that does it all: looks amazing, tells your story, makes people love your brand, goes viral.

The problem is, chasing this be-all and end-all of infographics is like trying to walk under a rainbow: barring a case of otherworldly luck, not possible. You could spend five months working on an infographic, going through seventeen iterations and getting approval (and accommodating the desires) of twenty-five managers, and still end up with an infographic that is seen by 5,000 people. Or you could spend those five months producing five infographics (for the same budget, because each of those 17 iterations will pile up on your costs), which collectively get more than 25,000 views. Which strategy was more successful?

5. You have all this data — and no idea what to do with it

This is actually one of the better problems to have with visual storytelling. There are people who now specialize in creating infographics — Visual.ly, of course, being the premier place to find them — and they can help you find a good story and tell it in an appealing way.

The key here is to listen to their advice – and trust that they know best what to do and how to do it. Too often, of course, that trust is hard to earn and, as iShotHim Creative Director Mike Jeters said at a recent Visual.ly meetup, the process of helping a client focus their story isn’t always easy, or quick:Image: Mike Jeters, iShotHim

The situation you don’t want to end up in is the one we described in the previous section: spending five months on an infographic that should have been completed in three weeks. Finding the right people to work with and trusting that they will do the best job possible for you and your goals should help you avoid that trap.
 

Infographics and data visualizations have been used by journalists for decades, but are still a relative newcomer to the corporate and non-profit worlds. Commissioners can learn a lot from data journalists, who usually produce visualizations under tight deadlines, with the main objective and accountability of telling a true story rather than a viral story. If you can avoid the five missteps outlined above, you will be on your way to better understanding the process of creating infographics and visual storytelling.
 

Featured image: Racheal Grazias / Shutterstock.com

Aleks Todorova is the Editorial Director of Visual.ly and has been working on telling stories for and with infographics for the past three years. Follow her on Twitter.

As soon as Halloween was over, it was time to turn the Visual.ly pumpkin into a Visual.ly pumpkin pie. The process is documented below.

— Real data visualization challenge: Do you bake from scratch? Photograph your ingredients and process the way we’ve done it below, and we’ll feature the best works on the blog! —

1. Crust

The crust is at its best if the butter used to make it is cut up into small pieces and frozen overnight.

Ingredients:

• 1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour, plus extra for rolling
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon sugar (increase to 1 1/2 teaspoons if for a sweet recipe)
• 8 Tbsp (1 stick) unsalted butter, very-cold, cut into 1/2 inch cubes
• 3 to 4 Tbsp ice water, very cold

For the rest of the recipe, click here.

2. Pumpkin Pie

Ingredients:

• 2 cups of pumpkin pulp purée (from Visual.ly pumpkin)
• 1 1/2 cup heavy cream or 1 12 oz. can of evaporated milk
• 1/2 cup packed dark brown sugar
• 1/3 cup white sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 eggs plus the yolk of a third egg
• 2 teaspoons of cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
• 1/4 teaspoon ground cardamon
• 1/2 teaspoon of lemon zest

For the rest of the recipe, click here.

3. Mixed and kneaded

4. Combined

5. Baked

6. Eaten!

7. Seeded

Not to leave any part of the pumpkin go to waste, Drew took care of roasting the seeds.

Ingredients:

• Enough butter to coat the seeds, melted
• Salt and seasonings to taste. (Recommended flavors: salted, cayene pepper, garlic.)
• Rinsed seeds

Spread seeds out in a single layer on baking sheet. Preheat oven to 300ºF, bake for 45 minutes.

Aleks Todorova is the Editorial Director at Visual.ly. On the extremely rare occasions of baking, she must follow a recipe to the “t”. Follow her on Twitter.

Generic as it sounds, it’s overwhelmingly true. Commissioners — the companies that hire designers or design firms to create infographics — want great results, whether it’s social media sharing, coverage by large websites and media or even achieving specific goal conversion rates. Designers want to work on and ultimately create a great piece that they are proud to include in their portfolio. And end users… well, they just like to look at great things that are beautiful, informative, original and shareable, ideally all at once.

So how do you make a great infographic?

In the past, we’ve talked about creating viral infographics and the role that story, data and design play there.

But viral doesn’t always equal “great” in a more conservative sense: a solid, informative, ethical piece that is beautifully designed and flawlessly executed. (Case in point: the Should I Text Him flowchart is simple, shareable and super fun. It is one of the most popular graphics on Visual.ly to date. But is it going to win a Malofiej 20 award next year, or any year? Doubtful.)

by beccaclason. Learn about infographics software.

Creating an infographic that is successful in the eyes of the client, design firm and audience is often elusive — but not impossible. At Visual.ly, we start out each project trying to do just that. Unfortunately, some projects get highjacked by corporate branding demands or unrealistic expectations (on part of the commissioner or designer… or both!). But others succeed. From our most successful projects (and the experience of going through not-so-successful ones), we’ve extrapolated what we consider to be the key ingredients of producing infographics we can all share with pride.

1. The idea

All successful infographics start out the same way – with a great idea. To come up with a great idea, it helps to think like a journalist. Journalists, unless they are covering breaking news, usually work with cycles. Take the personal finance space: in November and December, everyone writes about holiday spending and saving. In January, it’s credit card debt hangover. February: love and money. March: taxes. And so on. Every year, the stories are similar, if not the same. So everyone looks for new angles or interesting ways to tell those stories. Some succeed, many get lost in the noise.

Same with infographics: chances are, your idea has already been done. Can you tell it in a new, more interesting way? Can you tie it into a recent event or interesting trend? Can you find a useful and informative angle that will really benefit your target audience? If not, you will only be putting your name and company logo on a piece that will become one of many — but not one that stands out.

2. The data

Many data visualization professionals, especially in the academic community, start with a data set and dig for stories in it. That is a great way to find new and interesting stories — provided you’ve got a good data set to work with, of course. But in corporate world, many commissioners are unwilling to take on the risk that their data will tell a story they (or their CMO) will not like.

So projects often start out with an idea, followed by chasing after the data to support it. If the idea is focused and flexible (i.e. we can change things if the data we find points us in a different or more interesting direction), great. If not, however, finding the data to support and visualize it is often a wild goose chase. Those are usually the cases where you must resort to questionable sources or even tweak data points in order to tell the story you are set on telling. This is wrong on many counts. For more on proper research and sourcing practices, please read our guide.

3. Willingness to let things go

Too often, we end up with more data than is needed to make a single infographic. And that’s perfectly fine — as long as the client is OK with excluding some (or a lot!) of it from the piece we’re working on. Trying to say everything with one infographic almost always results in a piece no one wants to read: either because there is just too much information in it and it becomes overwhelming, or because it lacks an actual story.

If you find it impossible to cut data out, get a fresh set of eyes. Here, your designer can be incredibly helpful: ask them what they would leave out if they were confined with certain print dimensions. What is the most interesting story that they see?

4. Honesty and humility

Think your company’s new product or factory is interesting enough to showcase in an infographic? Unless your new product is the cure for cancer or your new factory was built on the Moon… chances are most people won’t care. Blatant self-promotion will also make it very difficult if not impossible to garner interest and pickup — not to mention, respect — from mainstream media and large websites. Even if you do have super interesting, never-before-released data, try to present it the way a respected publisher would: focus on the data and the story, not on the branding.

5. Trust

Finally: trust your team. Your researcher and/ or editor know best how to find and tell a good story. Your data analyst knows best what your data says. Your designer knows best how to design. Trust those people to do the best job they can do, because you can be sure that they are trying. Being too controlling as a client or showing in any way that you do not trust the team will only alienate them – you will lose their trust, but worse, you will lose their creativity and eagerness to produce something that they, too, will showcase with pride.

Credit for cover image (cc, licensed for commercial use): Ashley Coombs

Aleks Todorova is a former financial journalist, now the Editorial Director at Visual.ly. Follow her on Twitter.

The good news is, we’ve got some visual help for your costume search. The five infographics may inspire your Halloween costume, or at least help you make a decision.

1. Often, a successful Halloween costume reflects the personality of the person wearing it. The handy infographic below will help you discover your Halloween Alter Ego, which should give you some great costume ideas.

by Overstock.Learn about business intelligence tools.

 
2. If you consider yourself a nerd, the Nerd’s Guide to a Successful Party Costume should help you identify what works best for you based on your appearance. You know, wearing glasses, having a thin build, large ears… stereotypical stuff like that.

Check out our data visualization blog.

 
3. Alternatively, you could use favorite Halloween costumes from years past as inspiration for Halloween 2012. Here are some Pop Culture Favorites from the past five years:

by Lemon.ly. Browse more infographics.

 
4. If you’re not comfortable with becoming the center of attention at the Halloween party or parade you’re attending, you may want to choose a costume that is more in line with what others will wear. This infographic was created based on Google search trends.

Browse more data visualization.

5. Last but not least, history buffs could take inspiration for their Halloween costumes from… well, history, with A Costume for Every Era:

by Column Five Media. Learn about infographics software.

Aleks Todorova is the Editorial Director at Visually. She is already working on assembling her DIY Halloween costume and will be sure to upload a photo on Twitter. Follow her for an update.

Then there’s National Running Day, held on the first Wednesday in June and celebrated by simply lacing up and going for a run. This year, National Running Day is on June 6, and to encourage you to join in the festivities, we thought we’d offer up some visual motivation. Check out these 12 infographics about running, get hyped up, and run!

1. Running outside may be free, but unless you want to get injured, you’ll need to pony up for the right pair of running shoes. And no, that doesn’t mean your favorite color or the coolest brand of the moment. Do that, and you may find yourself the proud owner of several black toes and bloody blisters, or worse — a stress fracture. Be smart and head to a specialty running store to get your feet measured and your stride examined, then buy the shoes recommended by the store clerk. In the meantime, REI’s How to Choose Running Shoes infographic gives you a run-down of the basics.

Browse more data visualizations.

2. If you didn’t heed the advice above and ran a 10K in your Converse sneakers, your body may be complaining. Or you did get the right pair of shoes, but got injured anyway. It happens. The infographic below lists the most common running injuries, along with their typical causes and symptoms.

Browse more data visualizations.

3. Most runners fear not bloody blisters or chafed underarms, but the horrible boredom caused by running on a treadmill. The treadmill workouts infographic below offers some encouragement:

Browse more infographics.

4. One item on the bucket list of many runners is running a marathon. And intimidating as 26.2 miles may seem, the fact is that with proper training and preparation, anyone can do it. No, seriously. Here’s a visual guide to marathon running to get you started.

Browse more data visualizations.

5. Every marathoner’s dream? Boston. The Boston Marathon takes place the third Monday of April (observed as Patriots’ Day in Massachusetts) and to qualify for it you’ve got to be fast. The infographic below looks at finish times for men and women and uncovers some interesting findings.

Browse more data visualizations.

6. Another iconic marathon is that in New York City. It is visualized in this infographic.

by visually. Browse more infographics.

7. So how much energy do you spend running a marathon? What about other sports? Energy in Sports has the answers.

Browse more data visualizations.

8. On the subject of energy, Calorie Intake and Outtake visualizes how much we need to run (compared with other activities, like walking or yoga) to spend the calories consumed by certain foods.

Browse more data visualizations.

9. Remember all that talk about running shoes? Some people shun shoes altogether — and the trend has been on the up. It’s the Barefoot Running Revolution!

Browse more infographics.

10. Also on the subject of running barefoot, Free Your Feet looks at why running shoes (allegedly) do more harm than good.

Browse more infographics.

11. The curiously-named Sports Bras vs Speedos infographic (we’ll take the former, thanks) visualizes survey results where you will find runners’ opinions on pretty much everything related to the sport, from preferred distance and time of day to run, to gear and motivation techniques.

Browse more data visualizations.

12. If you’ve been running for a while, sooner or later you’ll find yourself plateauing — not seeing the progress you’d been making when you first got started (i.e. getting faster, fitter, slimmer — all that goodness). The solution? Introduce some interval training: workouts where you alternate high-exertion exercise (say, sprinting) with periods of rest. You can do that in cross-training, too: This Guide to Interval Training walks you through the main types of interval training and suggests some workouts that you can implement in runs, bike rides or gym workouts.

by voltiercreative. Browse more infographics.

 
Aleksandra Todorova is the Editorial Director at Visual.ly. When she isn’t editing or creating infographics with the team, she runs.

As a race-loving runner who moved to the Bay area less than two years ago, this year is my first chance to run Bay to Breakers. And since I live in South Bay, it is also my first chance to run across San Francisco and its infamous hills.

I didn’t have time to test-run the course — a decision I may regret on Sunday. But two days before the race, I decided to study the elevation maps and see where and just how bad is that hill on top of which the drunk people reportedly double over and return their breakfast.

The official map provided by the race organizers was fun, but hardly any help. (Really, guys? A gif image? In the age of Google maps?)

So I headed over to MapMyRun.com, where runners can map their runs or search (and study) those of other runners. Below is a screenshot of the map of the Bay to Breakers course; and here is the link:

Thanks to the interactivity, I was able to find out that the worst of the climb lasts for only 0.7 miles and… well, it doesn’t look that bad, does it?

But then I headed over to “Detailed Climb Data” and…

… Holy smokes, it’s Mount Everest! How do people even climb that thing without oxygen masks?

Drama, drama. I decided to check another app, which I use religiously, to track my runs – and which we recently featured in a blog post on apps that visualize fitness data: RunKeeper.com.

This is the elevation map provided by RunKeeper.

OK, so that isn’t that bad, is it?

As you can see, the X axis, which represents miles, stretches out to scale with the map. Those 7.5 miles look much “longer” than the 7.5 miles visualized in the elevation map at MapMyRun, and the inclines look much less steep.

What gives? Why are the two maps so different? I turned to my colleague Drew Skau, who not only has extensive knowledge of the art and science of data visualization, but is always willing to share it, often by writing for this blog.

He told me that the devil is in the scale. Both visualizations have a fixed vertical pixel height for their graphs, but neither gives accurate elevation profiles.

The charts have been made to fit to the space they have been allocated on the webpage. So if the chart is 50px tall by 600px wide, that’s what the space used to scale the charts. In both cases, that’s problematic.

In both visualizations, the Y axis uses a different scale than the X axis. Brutal as those San Francisco hills are, we are certainly not going to climb one mile up, then go one mile down. In fact, the elevation change for the Bay to Breakers race is only 279 feet. This means that in a 600px wide chart, we only need a little over 4px to show the vertical change. That wouldn’t just look tiny, Drew says, “it would look like nothing.”

If you want to actually see the slope you will be climbing up or descending, you have to visualize elevation using the same scale as distance, and clearly that can be a problem for a race that’s 7.5 miles long. Unless you create a chart that scrolls horizontally for a long, long time, you will have trouble visualizing long runs properly. The longer the race, the flatter its elevation chart would look — and that could give you a completely wrong idea of how easy your race would be.

The solution, for a runner, would be to lace up a day or two before the race and do a quick walk through the course, or those parts of it that seem questionable on the elevation charts.

Or, you could do like me and, after several hours of staring at different charts and maps, decide to wing it, after all. Just hold on to your breakfast!

Aleksandra Todorova is the Editorial Director at Visual.ly. She runs an average 20 miles a week on the flat trails of South Bay and has mixed feelings about hills.