Running in the Future

Nicholas is here! Hooray! I'm excited about this race and this blog, buddy.

I'm about averaging 4 miles a run myself. That's a good easy distance, and one I can knock out when I'm pressed for time, which seems like is always. But I know I'm going to have to seriously step it up seriously soon. Today I've got to pull it together for a longer run-- I'm going to try to go 7 miles, which I haven't done for a few weeks due to time and illness. Seven miles. That's only 19.2 miles short of the marathon.

So the latest news in my life is that I have officially joined the future and purchased an iPhone (I refuse to go back to AT&T, but as soon as Verizon got it I went for it). This will be either a massive boon to or drag on my productivity. So far, it's been a big time-sink as I do little but play with it. However, the run tracking apps are truly amazing.

There are apps that use the GPS tracking in your phone to track the route of your run, calculate your pace, give you your split times, estimate calories burned, you name it. It's what I've been doing manually the past year using MapMyRun. I've really liked that website, but they've recently undergone an overhaul that's increased the amount of social networking type gimmicks but not improved the functionality of the maps, which is the one thing I care about.

MapMyRun has an iPhone app, which I've downloaded, but a friend told me about the app for RunKeeper, which is giving MapMyRun a run for its money. I really like how simple RunKeeper is, so I'm switching over, at least for now.

Here's my RunKeeper profile. I've kept the maps private, but it shows my distance and pace and all that. And I think if you have a profile, you can friend me and see the maps.