Running Sparklines

I got the little Nike+ pedo­meter for my iPod last year to track my run­ning pro­gress. Yeah, that’s right its was purely for exer­cise sake…yeah. Yes, its a gad­get. I like gad­gets. And this one is very cool. If you don’t know the Nike+ doodad. There is a wire­less receiver that attached to your iPod and a trans­mit­ter that you put in your shoe. Although Nike advert­ises par­tic­u­lar shoes with a magic com­part­ment for it, real­ity is, its easy to simply insert it into the tongue of the shoe or use a vari­ety of means to attach it else where to the show and it works great.

Once calibrated…and this is very import­ant to do — my exper­i­ence run­ning the United Way 5K and rely­ing on the device is covered in this entry — the Nike+ tracks your pace, and a vari­ety of other met­rics as you run. It gives you a very inform­at­ive read out on your iPod and actu­ally tail­ors the music to your pace. The soft­ware it installs is very impress­ive and I found that it did incent you to run. The more import­ant piece of the puzzle is that it stores this inform­a­tion in th iPod and then syncs it with Nike’s site when you sync your iPod. It hap­pens auto­mat­ic­ally if you set it up to do so and it works like a charm. This allows you to mon­itor your pro­gress and get graphic feed­back on your per­form­ance dur­ing indi­vidu­als runs as well as over time. The site is well designed and prom­ises even greater feed­back int eh future. I am a sat­is­fied and pleased user.

rather than wait for Nike or Apple, <a href=“http://www.runometer.com” target=_blank” >runometer.com has cre­ated a web­site that allows you to take the inform­a­tion that Nike stores on your iPod even fur­ther. By access­ing the XML files that the Nike+ device cre­ates, and upload­ing them to the site, you get quick little spark­lines show­ing your pace/duration with a high degree of gran­u­lar­ity.. You can store your com­plete list of runs here and the site allows you to see much of what Nike masks from the the user. You can even upload GPX files obtained with your handy little GPS device and com­bine the run with routes and add to a Google Maps mashup. Way too cool. I know there was a reason I was car­ry­ing that GPS receiver in my knapsack.

So why is all of this bey­ond simple gad­get lust? My argu­ment would simply be that any­thing that incents me to work out is a good thing. For me, being able to mon­itor the met­rics asso­ci­ated with the workout amuse me and keep me work­ing out. The Nike+ is a really good tie in for the iPod and gives you a very per­son­al­ised exper­i­ence when run­ning. Ulti­mately, it provides me with a more user-sculpted envir­on­ment.