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Runners call the total distance they run in the seven-day week their weekly mileage. Some people call this metric weekly volume, but since we're only dealing with two dimensions, distance and time, they should at least say weekly area^🔊.

Weekly mileage on Strava athlete's profile

Weekly mileage on Strava is often visualized with bar charts. However, these visual representations fall short when trying to answer actual questions about this data.

[Strava](www.strava.com) is a social network where endurance athletes upload GPS data of their activities. This site also visualizes this data with bar charts, such as those to the right. But, these visualizations don't actually help me answer the questions I have about this data: * What percentage of my overall weekly mileage was a specific run? * Roughly how much of my weekly mileage was in workouts vs easy runs? * How many weeks has my weekly mileage been more than *x* miles? * How far did I actually run on any given week? While the bar chart is an effective way to compare weeks, aggregating the entire week into one bar smoothes over salient details that can help me answer these questions. My version simply stacks without aggregating, creating columns out of stacks of *activity bricks.* Each brick represent one run. The taller the brick, the longer the activity. Bricks are grouped and color coded by workout type. The stacking order of workout type is fixed so that hard efforts, such as *long runs* and *workouts*, are at the bottom of the y-axis. This ordering facilitates easily comparisons against a common baseline. Hovering over any individual brick brings up a tooltip of stats about that run and the entire week. *Hat tip to Shirley Wu who used this technique for a Google News Lab project [visualizing search data of travel destinations](http://explore-adventure.com).*