According to Walk Jog Run my current figure-eight walk around my block and the one north of me totals 0.87 miles, which seems significantly more than I would have guessed. Anyway on a good day I do that route in about 30 minutes, which given my condition would be very good for .87 miles, and isn't bad for the .6 or so I thought it really was.
Is Walk Jog Run (which is based on Google Maps) reliable for short distances? I could imagine an evil business model based on making runners feel good by making them think they were going farther then they really were….
I am an avid runner and just recently started triathlon. I have used the odometer on my car, GPS based pedometers on watches, stride based pedometers, and Google Maps based pedometers (not Walk Jog Run) to measure the distance of my runs. All of them will give slightly different results for the same route. I suggest that you measure your route with your car odometer and split the difference between whatever Walk Jog Run tells you and what the car odometer tells you.
I found it surprising that distances actually add up pretty quick, I haven’t used this site but one called runkeeper which is free and iPhone compatible, it stacks up pretty well against the omron pedometer I have too.