Nike+

I guess it was around a couple of years ago when Apple and Nike partnered up on the Nike+. It's small pedometer that tracks your run and sends the data to your iPod as you run. The iPod tracks the distance run, the time and calculates the calories burned. I didn't think much of it at the time, other than that it seemed a little gimmicky. And since I wasn't running at the time I really didn't care. Then sometime last year, Wired magazine ran an article about it and highlighted the website Nike set up to upload the data captured by a runner's Nike+ and how much people who were using it liked it. It definitely made it sound more interesting than my first impression had been.

About a week ago I saw one in a store and bought it, mostly as an impulse purchase. After I got home I began reading on the box (with a magnifying glass!) and saw that it said the requirements were an iPod Nano or an iPhone or iPod Touch and a pair of Nike+ shoes. My initial thought was I was going to have to return it since I wasn't about to go buy a new pair of shoes to use it with. But I did some googling and found out you can use them with any pair of shoes as long as you have a way to attach it to them. And there are several companies making little pouches for it that attach to your shoes laces. And I saw a couple of Vibram Fivefingers shoes wearers who said they used it with no problems. So I found a pouch for it at Best Buy and finally tried the whole thing out last night.

Out of the box it says it's about 90% or more accurate for most runners, but you can calibrate it to your own stride so that's what I did. You calibrate it by setting a  distance on the iPod then running that distance. I calibrated it to a one mile run. After I ran the "calibration" mile, I went ahead and did two more miles. I was pretty impressed with the result. It said I ran 1.93 mile (I did cut the second mile a bit short as I went to my car in the parking lot rather than continued on the track to my starting point), and it gave my total time, and per mile average as well as telling me I had burned 180-some odd calories.

Then this morning when I plugged my iPod into my computer at work iTunes asked if I wanted to automatically upload the Nike+ data to Nike's web site which I did. I went to the website and signed up for an account. It then displayed my run from last night (the two miles I ran after calibration). So here's a screenshot of the graph it displayed of the data from my run.

Click on the image to see it full sized. You can see how it tracks your speed. You can adjust how many data points it uses to display the graph shown above. Initially, it displayed a much smoother graph but I adjusted it to show more data and got this much more wavy graph. I added a couple of arrow points in Photoshop that show where I walked for a minute or so between the two miles, and a little hump right before the end where I gave a kick for the last 150 yards or so. Pretty slick I thought. It will keep track of all the runs I do with it, so it should be interesting to track my progress.

I really had to make myself run last night. My head just wasn't into it and I had a difficult time making myself go just three miles, even with the new toy. I need to get out this evening too since K. Lee has her first softball game of the spring tomorrow evening and I probably won't be able to run again until this weekend. Hopefully I'll have a better attitude about it.