Drawing a route people can follow in the dark

I draw maps for a living, and the hardest thing to accept about club routes is that the best one is rarely the most interesting. The route a club runs every Saturday has a different job from the route you would pick for yourself. It has to work for forty people at four different paces, in February, when it is dark for the first twenty minutes and a third of them have never run it before.

Clubs posted 2,318 group runs on Pacer last month. Looking at which routes get reused week after week and which get quietly dropped, a few rules come up again and again.

1. Loops beat everything

A loop ends where it starts, which means the cars, the coffee and the people who finished early are all in one place. It also means nobody has to turn around, and turning around is where groups come apart: the fast runners reach the turn, come back through the slow runners, and suddenly nobody is sure who is in which group.

If the geography forces an out-and-back, put the turn at something unmissable. A lighthouse, a bridge, a gate. Never "after about four kilometers."

2. Count the decisions

Every junction is a decision, and every decision is a chance for someone at the back to go the wrong way. Walk through your route and count them. A good club loop has fewer than six. The best ones have two or three: follow the water, cross the second bridge, come back along the other bank.

• Prefer one long path to several short streets, even if it adds distance.
• Turn the same direction every time if you can. "All the turns are left" is a route description anyone can hold in their head.
• Mark the one turn people miss. Every route has one. Write it on the card: the turn at the Vermont Street bridge comes up fast.

3. Put the hill in the middle

A hill in the first kilometer strings the group out before anyone is warm. A hill in the last kilometer is cruel. In the middle, it gives each group a natural place to regather at the top, and the lead a place to count.

Say how big it is, too. "The one hill: Castle Rise at km 4, 7% for 300 m" is the most reassuring sentence a nervous runner can read, because it says there is only one.

4. Markers people can say out loud

Kilometer markers on a map are for the lead. What members use are landmarks: the boathouse, the red bridge, the water fountain. When a route is snapped to paths, we place the kilometer markers automatically, but the route gets better when a lead renames two or three of them after what is actually there.

Nobody has ever regrouped at kilometer 4.2. Everyone has regrouped at the boathouse.

5. One start, described the way the club says it

The start pin is the most-read thing on any run card. It should be exact to within a few steps and named in the club's own words. Not the park's official name. The thing people actually say: by the blue bollards, under the clock, at the top of the steps.

If a first-timer can stand on the pin and see the group, the route has done its first job. If they can then run the whole thing with their phone in their pocket, it has done the rest.