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Keep Track of Workouts With the RunKeeper iPhone App

Dawn Foster — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 14:00:11 +0000

I’ve talked about the importance of fitness for web workers many times before. A side effect of spending our days working online is that most of our working hours are spent sitting in front of a computer, so we should make a special effort to fit some type of physical activity into our daily habits. Having software to track my progress makes a big difference in my motivation to work out. I like being able to see that I ran faster or further today than I did yesterday, which helps me to always try to work a little harder everyday to keep the trend lines moving in the right direction.

This week, I’ve been playing with the RunKeeper iPhone app to track my workouts. I wanted to play with something different to track my runs, and some friends have been using RunKeeper, so I thought that I would give it a try. RunKeeper has been around for a while, so it is only new to me, but I like it way better than I thought I would.

I really like the RunKeeper approach. You hit a single button to start your workout and another to stop the workout, and when you press stop, you have the option to save or discard. Saved workouts are automatically sent to your RunKeeper account, where you can log in to view all of the details from your workout in a web interface with maps and a variety of statistics about your workout.

RunKeeper tracks all of the important aspects of my running workouts:

Start time, end time and duration to keep track of how long I’ve been working out, to help me identify any differences in my performance based on the time of the day that I did my run.
Distance, pace and speed help me make sure that I’m going a little further every day to build my running endurance (one of my personal workout goals).
Climbed (altitude) is particularly important for me, since most of my workouts include a fair amount of elevation gain, and the altitude gain of my workout is going to impact speed.
Calories burned is calculated based on your body weight and distance; however, it also seems to factor in speed, since I did two nearly identical distance workouts, but one was 10 minutes shorter with more calories burned. It shows that they are doing something more sophisticated with their calorie calculations than a simple distance and body weight computation, which I thought was a nice touch.

I also like being able to edit my route for those times when you lose your GPS connection, or when you are making turns more quickly than the GPS sampling can accurately record. I edited my route for one of my workouts when it looked like I was short cutting through people’s yards, instead of staying on the sidewalk. It was fairly easy to drag the route back into place, which triggered a recalculation of distance.

The privacy features are fairly robust with several options for how you can choose to share your workouts or keep them private. You can choose to automatically make your routes and runs public and share them over Twitter and Facebook. You can also decide not to automatically share everything, and just share individual activities on an ad hoc basis. The option that I’ve selected is to keep everything private.

My one big complaint with RunKeeper is that when I registered, it emailed my password to me in clear text. This is a rookie web application mistake that should be fixed as soon as possible by moving to commonly accepted password best practices, like encrypting passwords for starters.

Despite this one major faux pas, I’m a huge fan of RunKeeper. I’m also using it in conjunction with DailyBurn, which helps me keep track of all of my workouts (weights, gym cardio, outdoor running, etc.) I plan to keep using RunKeeper, at least until I get distracted by the next shiny iPhone fitness application.

RunKeeper is available in two flavors. RunKeeper Free is ad-supported, while RunKeeper Pro costs $9.99 and has audio cues (you can hear your stats via your headphones) and training workouts (hear time-based or distance-based interval workouts through your headphones).

How do you keep track of your workouts and stay motivated to keep fit?

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MotionX-GPS iPhone App For Fitness Tracking

Dawn Foster — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 20:00:31 +0000

Staying fit is particularly important for those of us who spend our days sitting in front of our computers. Exercise provides many benefits, including keeping your brain working better, improved mood, longer lifespan, increased stamina and reduced risk for many health issues. I’ve written before about how I use technology to keep myself on track and motivated about my fitness regime. This weekend, I ran across a great new fitness tool that uses the GPS functionality of my iPhone to automatically map my workouts and provide me with data including speed, distance, altitude, maps, photos and more.

MotionX-GPS for the iPhone comes in two flavors: a free Lite version with somewhat limited functionality and a full version currently available for $2.99. I used the Lite version for my evaluation, but I’m already thinking about upgrading to the paid version. I gave it a pretty good test with a 1.5-hour, 5.3-mile workout over a combination of city streets and a hike up a local mountain, but there are so many features packed into this app that I wasn’t able to test absolutely everything.

To get started, all you need to do is start the stopwatch, and it starts tracking all of your statistics automatically using the iPhone functionality. The stopwatch screen keeps track of your elapsed time, current speed, average speed, maximum speed and distance. The average speed looks about right for me, but I’m a little suspicious of my maximum recorded speed of 10.1 mph and suspect that it was caused by a temporary glitch (I’m just not that fast!).

You can also take pictures from the stopwatch view and the pictures are tagged with additional data: time taken, distance from starting point, altitude, and latitude/longitude. The picture also shows up on the map so that you can see exactly where you were when you took the photo. I’ve had some difficulty getting it to display multiple photos from the workout, but I’m not sure if it’s a limitation of the Lite version, a user error or a bug in the software.

After you finish your workout, you can share it with other people via the MotionX community, Twitter, Facebook or email. I’m not a big fan of sending automated messages to Twitter and Facebook, so I opted for email sharing to test this feature. The email contains data about date, time, distance, speeds, altitude, latitude, longitude and more. It comes with a link to Google Maps to see your route on a bigger screen than the one on your iPhone. The email also has attachments that included my photo, and the data in .gpx and .kmz formats, which can be used to export your workout maps and other information to various mapping services.

The app even includes a compass, which is based on GPS data to determine the direction that you’re traveling. Obviously, it only works when you are moving and the iPhone can determine your direction based on your direction of movement, since the iPhone has no built-in magnetic compass. While I wouldn’t rely on it for navigation, it was an interesting use of the technology.

You can also set up waypoints for your starting points, ending points or key milestones along the way. This allows you to see your movement throughout your workout on the map to keep track of your progress toward a location goal.

The biggest downside to this app is the drain on battery life. I started with almost a full charge on my iPhone, and by the end of my 1.5-hour workout, I had used almost half of the charge. They do give you several tools and suggestions to reduce the battery drain, but I wanted to test the experience using mostly the default settings. I suspect that their tips will help with battery life, but you should probably plan to recharge the battery after your workout.

I love being able to see all of this data about my workouts, so I’m going to keep using MotionX-GPS for my outdoor workouts. I still enter the final time and distance results into DailyBurn to keep all of my gym workouts and outdoor workouts results tracked in one place. Ideally, I would like to see the two services integrate together with a “share to DailyBurn” feature.

MotionX-GPS is available from the App Store. The free Lite version includes full tracking functionality but can’t store as many waypoints or tracks as the full version, and is missing some of the customization features of the full version.

What tools do you use for real-time workout tracking?

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How Important Is a Good Name?

Dawn Foster — Thu, 28 May 2009 18:00:55 +0000

I spend a significant amount of time, more than I probably realize, naming things both online and offline. We have usernames, Twitter handles, blogs, training classes, books, events, and so much more. Each one needs to have a name, and many of us probably don’t spend as much time as we should when picking a name. Personally, I hate coming up with names: the brainstorming to come up with something unique, the paralysis of choosing, the uncertainty about choosing something that won’t work as well as you thought it would, having to change the name later, and more. I prefer being poked with a sharp stick.

I started thinking more about naming this week when I went to my fitness tracking web site, Gyminee, and found myself on a new web site, DailyBurn. After poking around on the blog to find out more about the change, I found this:

So, why the name change? First, we noticed that while Gyminee was a memorable name, nobody could spell it! This is significant considering that people need to type in our web address in order to sign up. Second, while we liked Gyminee, we wanted a name that would resonate better with what we are all about; improving health one step at a time, essentially daily change. Oh yeah, we also got a little tired of hearing jokes about a cricket and hearing, “Isn’t that the name of a kid’s clothing store?”

As painful as it is to change names, I think they probably made a wise choice. I’ve made similar choices in the past. For example, I’ve renamed my blog three times. It started out as the “Open Source Culture” blog, but I found the topic of open source to be too narrow when my interests started spreading out into many other areas of online communities and social networking. I wanted to keep something similar, so I dropped the word “Source” and changed it to the “Open Culture” blog, which turned out to be a terrible name. It meant nothing, it wasn’t memorable, and there were many other blogs and podcasts with the same name.

I finally got fed up and decided to come with a brand-new name and a real logo for my blog. I wanted something that would evolve with me and wouldn’t be tied to a particular technology. I also wanted something that was tied to me, but was more creative than using my name. I came up with the idea to use an anagram of my name, and I cycled through several of them before I found one that I liked with an available domain name: Fast Wonder. For the logo, I went with a Southeastern Five Lined Skink, a very fast type of lizard that I would often see on my grandparents’ deck in Tennessee when I was a kid. This skink is black, orange, and vibrant blue, so I took its colors as the scheme for my blog.

Originally, I had a static web site using the fastwonder.com URL and put the blog at fastwonderblog.com. In retrospect, this was a domain naming mistake. Finding the right name to use for your URL is just as important as the name itself, and I should have spent more time thinking about the domain names and how they would work together. If I was starting from scratch, I would have put the blog somewhere on the fastwonder.com URL, but I think the SEO hit from moving it now outweighs the potential benefits of moving it, so I’ve decided to leave it on fastwonderblog.com.

Here are a few things you might want to think about the next time you need to pick a name.

Is the domain name available?
Is it unique and memorable?
Does it fit well with your business and the image you want to project?
Will the name grow with you or limit you later?
Will it be confused with other names?
Are there any obvious jokes about crickets or anything else that might get annoying?
Can people spell the name?
Is it short enough not to be annoying when typing it on an iPhone or other mobile device?

What mistakes have you made with past names? What steps did you take to fix those naming mistakes?

Image by stock.xchng user thenys

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