Welcome to "Virtual LEJOG", the exercise motivation app for those wanting to take a virtual trip along any one of 21 famous cycling routes in the United Kingdom and Europe

'LEJOG' is an acronym for "Lands End to John O Groats", one of the most famous travel routes in the world. The route starts at Lands End in Cornwall at the most south westerly point of the United Kingdom and ends at John O Groats at the most north eastern end of Scotland. Each year thousands of people walk, cycle or drive this route.

With this app you can complete a virtual journey along the same route or any of the other 20 routes that are available. The app allows you to:
- Select a route
- Choose the starting location.
- Capture your daily progress along the route via travel entries entered by the app user or captured automatically from your smart watch or phone device.
- The app will display your progress along the route on maps, and report on the statistics of the exercises captured by the journey.
- Optionally view the user's current virtual journey location via a Google 'street view' - great for viewing the different terrains the journey covers

The app also supports group journeys, where you can invite your friends and colleagues to participate on the same virtual journey. With this option the app will display the progress of all group members and show the position of all group participants on the map displays.

The app can be used to provide extra motivation and interest for persons engaged on a regular exercise plan. The interest and fun provided by seeing your progress over the route really does help motivate users to keep those good exercise habits going.

The app will be of particular interest to Fitbit device users, as the app provides integration to automatically import your Fitbit step and activity data.

Equally for those people who participate with friends in a shared exercise challenge then the 'group journey' aspect of the app can introduce some friendly rivalry as everybody can see how others in the group are performing.

The basic version of the app is free, and this allows you to:
- Setup and start a journey
- Manually enter your travel progress on the journey
- View your progress on large and small scale route maps
- View journey statistics.

There are a number of in-app paid options that extend the fun and interest:
- Cloud storage of journey data: by default the app stores all journey data on your local device. This paid option will store data in a secure cloud location, allowing the journey progress to be viewed across multiple devices.
- Street view: this option will allow you to view your current virtual journey location using a Google Street view. This is a fun extra feature that allows you to view the wide range of terrains that exist over the route.
- Automatic collection of data from smart devices: for those using a smart watch or smart phone to capture their exercise activities then the app can be setup to automatically this data from those sources. This avoids the need to manually input travel progress and is a great option for those who make active use of smart devices to capture exercise outcomes. The initial release of the app supports Fitbit device integration.
- Group journeys: share the fun with friends and colleagues. Up to 11 other people can be invited to join a group journey, where each of the participants can view progress across the group.

Each of these paid options can be purchased at any time during your use of the app.

Using the app will create a user account with user name and password. This information is stored in a Google Firebase database in the cloud. The user account can be deleted from either within the app, or by a request to the vendor at this contact form web address: https://essays-in-software.com/apps/contact/