Free Candy For Everyone

I hit 100 miles and my running stopped for a few days there. But today I ran and hopefully I’m back on track. I went over to the Nike+ site after uploading my data and went poking around to look at my stats. There wasn’t any announcement of new features that I’d seen anywhere but I noticed a “Share your runs” option that hadn’t been there before.

This lead me to a page where I could get some code to embed a widget with my run data on a web page. Look at my run data in all its glory!

This is the recent runs module. There were two other options for fastest run and farthest run, but I figured I’d use this one since it’s the most interesting to me.

The Nike+ site is really great and they keep adding nice new features like this one. I find it rather strange that they’re not sending me emails with the new features and telling me to go check them out. Or doing what Google does whenever there’s a new gmail feature and putting some glaring red text up on the screen saying “New Features, Click Here!”

All in all, I have no doubt I would long ago have stopped running if it weren’t for Nike+. Kudos to them on an excellent product that just keeps improving.

Yay, just completed 100 miles total using the Nike+ running system!

Here, go check out my “certificate”. Of course, that let’s you see how slowly I run. Oh well, I’m working on it!

Back in January, I started running. I’d been going to the gym, but decided to switch things up by adding a once-a-week run to the mix. Well, that wasn’t the only reason. Another part of my decision was that I really wanted to use the Nike+ system. I’m not sure where I first heard about the system, possibly on Binary Bonsai.

It’s a pretty simple system. If you have a iPod Nano, you can spend a mere $30 to get a little foot sensor and a receiver to plug in to the iPod. It tracks your steps and can tell you how far and how fast you’ve gone. And it gives you awesome graphs and a great community site to top it off. I figured $30 was a minor investment, and I picked one of these things up in March.

Up to that point, I’d been loosely following the Nike 5k Training Schedule. It asked you to run 3-4 times per week, however, and I was only putting in about 2. But then I got the Nike+ system. And it sat on my coffee table. But then my brother got the Nike+ system and started running and competition was born. I set the thing up and I was running. And running way more frequently and consistently than I had before we both got the toy. I mean awesome training device!

You see, Nike+ let’s you set up challenges. You can challenge any other Nike+ user to one of a few sorts of challenges. My brother and I are in a challenge to be the first to 100. I’m winning for the moment. But we’re neck and neck. Here’s the screen:

I’m Kaeta, my brother is teich. There’s even a little set up for talking trash to each other. We’re not exactly engaged in a brilliant back and forth here, but I’ll show you our last few comments anyways:

The best part of the whole thing is that we’re motivated. I’m not really good at the running yet. I don’t feel quite up to running with another person. And my brother lives too far away to be a good daily running partner anyways. This way, we get to help motivate each other without having to meet in person. Yay for the interwebs!

And some of the other information available - you can check out stats on all your past runs and compare them. I could do with a bit more info, like a way to overlay arbitrary runs over each other to see how your speed matches up, or see absolute speed at any point in the run. But maybe we’ll get more features soon. That’d be awesome. I leave you with my most recent runs:

And now to get some sleep! Gotta wake up and run tomorrow. Training for 10K now.