Karen writes: Toys to make training easier

There are running essentials, like the right socks, shoes etc.   Then there are the non-essential things which just make the kilometers more fun and help make some sort of sense of it all.

In this latter category comes my Nike sports-band.  It was a whim type purchase off Trade-me, I put in a silly bid and was surprised to win the auction and even more surprised that it actually worked. It is a little USB thingy which sits in a wristband and talks to a sensor attached to your shoe.  It tells you...time on the road, roughly how many km you run, and more importantly it gives a pace.   When you get home after your run you stick it in the computer port, it uploads the information and pretty graphs are drawn, comparisons made with others in the 'Nike community' and you get little supportive messages saying well done etc when you meet certain milestones.  Scarily it also does sinister things like connecting to facebook, do I really want everyone knowing that I ran 5km and it took a whole hour because I forgot to turn the thing off when I stopped for a natter?

I went out for another dog-assisted bush run tonight, we had a lovely 14.7km thrash through the bush only coming home when it started to get dark.  I got teased by some mountain bikers who thought I was cheating having the dog tow me up the hills...she wasn't really...much.  Anyway, we got home and I plugged the thingy in, there is a brand new updated website so I looked at it in a bit more detail than I usually do.  Apparently I have spent over 66 hours running since January (probably a lot more actually as I often forget the sportsband or don't charge it up, still seems like a lot though), burned off 41000 calories just with running alone (that is 20 full days worth of energy!), and my speed is going up according to the graph at the bottom of the picture.   New resolution.  Charge the dratted thing up, remember to put it on for every run, set some goals and see if I can make it actually work for me!

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