This past Saturday, ambitious runners took on the Catalina Eco Marathon, a race that loops around California’s Santa Catalina Island off the coast of Los Angeles. To visualize the mountainous path along the marathon route, I used Mapbox Satellite and 3D extrusions.
The height of each extrusion represents the elevation. It’s a beautiful 3D profile over the entire landscape of the island.
To create the visual, I queried the elevation along the route using the Mapbox global elevation tileset, Terrain-RGB. Then, I extruded each segment of the route with its elevation using data-driven styles and the fill-extrusion-height property.
With an elevation gain of about 2300 feet, this is one tough marathon. The fastest runner completed the course in 03:20:31, at a pace of about 7 minutes 40 seconds per mile.
What pace do you think you could complete it in? Set the pace, toggle the camera view, and take off from the finish line to find out! Zoom in to take in the sights along the way.