less like a run, more like a crawl...

Sorry for not posting yesterday. I meant to and then time got away from me. Using some Christmas money while I was running errands yesterday, I picked up a Nike+. I haven't had an iPod in a while. I have a 30gigabyte iPod Video somewhere in the apartment but at one point it got fried in a faulty car charger and while it powered up it wouldn't hold a charge. Not a great characteristic in an iPod. Angela thought that hers was acting up so she used some Christmas money to purchase a new one off of Craigslist. I got to inherit her old one when it turns out that for whatever reason it IS working ok. Yay me! Or something like that anyway. I know I need to maintain decorum around here)

Anyway, I had a $5 Rewards Zone coupon to use and I needed to pick up a new cassette adaptor for my car and while I was there I was swayed by the fact that the little Nike+ was only $30.

Last summer Wired did an entire issue on how we use data. One of the articles delved into the little +. The thing that piqued my interest was this.

Nike+ isn't a perfect tool; it wasn't designed to be. But it's good enough, and more crucially, it's simple. Nike learned a huge lesson from Apple: The iPod wasn't a massive hit because it was the most powerful music player on the market but because it offered the easiest, most streamlined user experience.

But that simple, dual-variable tracking can lead to novel insights, especially once you have so many people feeding in data: The most popular day for running is Sunday, and most Nike+ users tend to work out in the evening. After the holidays, there's a huge increase in the number of goals that runners set; this past January, they set 312 percent more goals than the month before.

There's something even deeper. Nike has discovered that there's a magic number for a Nike+ user: five. If someone uploads only a couple of runs to the site, they might just be trying it out. But once they hit five runs, they're massively more likely to keep running and uploading data. At five runs, they've gotten hooked on what their data tells them about themselves.

When I got home I logged on to the Nike+ website and created a little Mini and putzed around a little on the site before I had to get back to work. I really intended to go out yesterday and do a short run but ended up not being able to until today. I woke up tired, in fact my first tweet this morning was "ugh. morning already? haha. lots of stuff to check off the list today. hope it's not as long as yesterday and more fruitful."

All morning I struggled with waking up. A can of Mountain Dew didn't help. Getting a little bite to eat didn't help. Nothing was really contributing to my becoming coherent so I got my gear together and headed out. Here's the little pouch for my sensor since my shoe doesn't have a pocket for it.

After being waylaid by having to fish the draw string out of my sweatpants (it was cold! I know I'm not from Texas and I realize that it was 17 in Colorado Springs today and colder than that in Minneapolis/St. Paul but it's all relative and in the last year I've lost the heartiness to go out and run in shorts on a windy 40 degree day.) I got out the door and started to jog. So far, so good. I made it out of the complex and ended up stopping almost immediately to try and sort out my playlist. I really didn't want to listen to all of my quiet music while I was trying to get out of the house. Crisis averted, I got going again. I guess I didn't realize how hilly our neighborhood is. After I got back I pulled up the route in Gmap Pedometer and was kind of surprised.

You start heading downhill a little but almost immediately start to climb out of a hill. Not a major one but it's enough that you feel it. Very quickly my jog turned into a walk. Jog. Walk. Jog. Walk. I'm only not frustrated at my performance because I know how close to ground zero I am and it's my first non-treadmill run this year but it was still frustrating. Also, almost immediately my back started to complain. I stopped to stretch but it never really got better. Thankfully it didn't get worse.

It was really a rather pedestrian stroll. Just a big loop around the neighborhood. Total mileage was around 4 miles. Right before I turned onto the highway that runs past our complex I saw this beautiful, flat, completely empty road. My route was NOTHING like this.

The only thing of note was that I discovered one a new favorite 'hate on a state' song. I'm not sure that's a category, but there has to be a whole list somewhere filled with songs that make fun of neighboring states. No offense to my friends from Ohio, but this song cracked me up... and I'm not sure there's ever been a rock songs that name checks US House Reps John Boehner and Jean Schmidt.

Anyway, I got home and dumped plugged my iPod in and the computer automatically asked me if I wanted to head over to Nike's site. Once there it imported my run and gave me this.

Then, it asked me how I felt. Nice to have a really simple way to keep a training log.

And I went ahead and joined my first Nike+ group...

I had to. It's like a state obligation.

So, summary, the Nike+ turns out to be kind of cool. It's really nice to be able to press a button and have a voice tell you your current running time, distance and speed. I think the tracking is going to be AWESOME. I'm quite out of shape (but I already knew that)... and I came home from the jog feeling much better than before I went. Another win. Hopefully I can keep it up.

More tomorrow. I've been thinking a lot about rides I'd like to do this year and I'd like to write up the options. Hopefully we'll also have some time for movies this weekend. It's been a couple days since I've written anything up.