Sunday, January 15

Run Rabbit, Run

If you are anything like me you are running out of time in the day. I don't have poor time management skills; I just suffer from 24 hour day syndrome.

I want to play more video games and spend more time with the kids and see more bands and have a mind knowingly successful career but with the choices I've made in life it's not all possible right now.

One aspect of my life I'd like to improve is my fitness. With most physical activity in the past 11 years since high school being Guitar Hero, I decided to start running, however the inner geek in me wanted to track, measure and report improvements. With this in mind I hit the App Store and found Runkeeper.

It costs next to nothing to buy and uses the GPS in your smart phone so you don't have to sync it to a $200 pair of Nikes to know your accomplishments.

Runkeeper accurately tracks your distance, coaches you through your exercise and displays your results in graph format to easily see when and where you are performing well.

It makes the lazy, fat bastard in me happy because I'm reaching my fitness goals but it's also appealing to the geek who likes stats and finding correlations and looking at graphs. With the exception of the sprained ankle I got from running too far, it's making me happy on many levels.

My only criticism is that you can't use the app to monitor changes to your weight or track any other health related issues; it's purely a distance/time/pace record.

Available on iOS and Android, you can use it for a variety of different sports - even swimming(?) and fun exercise like snowboarding.

I realize this isn't in the world of gaming but health is important to us all. With more smart phones and technology available to us, some things we dislike or ignore have been made easier to get through. Give it a go - it might be the change of pace you are looking for.

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