andrewlighten.com

Wow, over a month since I’ve posted to my poor neglected blog. Time flies.

Anyway, spring has sprung, and we took a trip to the velodrome with the girls after school a couple of days ago. The velodrome is in beautiful condition at the moment. Really looking forward to using it a lot during the summer.

The girls both took the vehicle of their choice – bike for the big girl, and scooter for the little one.

The scooter was fun for a while, then it was more exciting to climb the embankment.

Both had fun.

Last week I bought myself a new pair of Nike runners – and this time I went for the Nike+ runners that take the little Apple Nike + iPod sender. It’s basically a slightly expensive pedometer. What it does, however, is talk to your iPod. You can run the Nike+ application on your iPod and it will record how far you’ve gone, how long you took, etc, and then when you sync the iPod via iTunes it will upload your run details to the Nike+ website.

While you’re pounding the pavement it will give you music, of course, and you can tailor that to the workout you’re doing. I usually just pick “shuffle” so I get a completely random mix of music, but you can also pick a specific playlist or have no music at all (which I’ll be using when walking with Lisa and the kids).

The Nike+ website is really neat. It’s pretty much divided into four main sections: what you’ve done, how you’ve done against the goals you’ve set, how you’ve done against the challenges you’re participating in, and how you’re going with your coaching program.

Runs

This area shows you what you’ve done in the past. You can graph your runs by week, month or year (or look at all runs) and then drill down into each run to see distance, time, calories, terrain, weather and how you felt. Here’s a graph of my runs for this month:

If you drill down into a particular run, you see a lot more detail:

The graph of speed over time obviously shows you how quickly you were going. You can see from this morning’s walk that I started off pretty easily, ramped up over the first 1/4 of the walk to a decent pace and then stayed pretty consistent.

You can also see that in the bottom right corner it shows the iPod workout was “Basic”. There are four types of workout:

• Basic is just a free and open ended workout. That’s what I’m using the most.
• Time is a workout with a time goal (“I want to walk for 45 minutes”).
• Distance is a workout with a distance goal (“I want to run 10km”).
• Calorie is a workout with an effort goal (“I want to burn 600 calories”).

Initially I couldn’t see much use for the last three when you’re running to/from home, but I have done one “Distance” walk and it worked pretty well. I told it I was going for 5km and it very subtly interrupted the music every kilometre and told me how far I’d gone. It also interrupted and told me when I was half way, so you can easily use it to do an out-and-back walk. I figure the time and calorie workouts would do the same.

Goals

The section of the website dealing with goals is really well done. You can define a series of goals in some very flexible ways. Right now my three goals are:

• Walk 10 times by 18th May
• Walk 30km by 19th May
• Burn 4000 calories by 19th May

These were setup when I bought the shoes (18th April) and I left the defaults of a month’s time in the goal.

You get a very clear graph showing how well you’re tracking against each goal. Here’s my distance goal:

I don’t have a “Run faster” goal setup because I’m only walking, not running.

Challenges

The challenges are similar to goals, but you’re competing against other Nike+ users. They’re working pretty hard to make it yet another social website, but given that I don’t have any Nike+ friends I have no idea how well that works. The challenges are ok though. I’m currently participating in three challenges:

 

Each challenge has a goal related to distance or pace. The “Loved ones lost to cancer” challenge is simple: walk 100km. Other challenges are beyond my level of fitness right now. One challenge called “Burn” is to see who can run the fastest 3km by 6th May 2010. You can create your own challenges too, and have other Nike+ users participate.

Coaching

The coaching section is pretty neat as well. You can sign up to a coaching program online and it will tell you what kind of workout you need to do to reach a particular goal. I signed up for the “Walk to Run” program (when I say “signed up”, they’re all free) and it will guide your workout over 12 weeks so you can progress from walking to running. The display is simple and shows you what you need to know.  The top half shows what you have to do this week, and the bottom half shows where you are within the training program:

Given that I’m not running I should probably change to another coaching program!

Summary

The whole user experience is outstanding. You want to have your iPod with you when you’re out walking by yourself anyway, so having your distance and pace data collected and matched to goals, challenges and training programs for free is really nice. It’s all wireless between your shoes and your iPod, then everything just falls into place when you sync your iPod. Any iPod touch (2nd generation) or iPhone 3G will work out of the box, and for the iPod Nano you can get a small adapter that plugs into the bottom to connect to the shoes. Because I’ve got a 2nd generation iPod touch all I had to do was get the shoes and the Nike + iPod sender. Everything else was there.