These heat maps represent when Runkeeper users most commonly started their runs in the United States during 2015. Dark blue regions represent times when high numbers of users started runs, while dark red regions represent times when few or no users started any runs. The heat maps are broken out separately for weekday and weekend runs, as there are substantial differences in behavior between the two categories.

There are a few fascinating patterns that can be seen for our U.S. runners:

Weekday morning runners pretty consistently get up around 6am to start their runs, more or less regardless of when the sun rises.

Evening runners, however, push later and later into the evening during the summer months, out to 9pm during mid summer. I suspect that this is either to beat the heat or to avoid getting blinded by the sun.

See those funny weekend spikes in March and November? Those are Sundays where the schedule is offset by an hour… because most runners haven’t adjusted to the start/end of Daylight Savings Time yet.

There are several weekdays throughout the year that look more like weekends, with later starts and early ends. These are holidays! Thanksgiving in particular stands out; mid-morning Turkey Trots make Thanksgiving one of the most popular running days of the year.

But the really fascinating things that I saw came from looking into the patterns of other countries. Below you can see the same heat maps rendered with Brazilian user data: