Nike+: My Own Nike+iPod Goodness

8GB iPod Nano - I’m A Winner! Technorati: Just Broke 30K!

May 03

Thanks to my turn of fortune and me winning an iPod Nano via a contest held by PureBlogging.com, I get to try something out that I have been dying to try for a very long time. Back in August of 2006 I read a blog post on Rasmus Lerdorf’s toy page titled *”Nike+iPod Goodness”.

Rasmus Lerdorf is the original creator of PHP. A huge hero of mine, so I always keep an eye out for his posts although they are very few and far between. He also has his own type of “toys” blogging page [*toys.lerdorf.com] as well where he talks about little web apps that he likes to play with as well as fun tech stuff he buys. Definitely a great place to stop by and take a look.

At the time Rasmus posted about Nike+, I had never even heard about it. To sum it up quickly, its basically a very advanced pedometer. It comes in 2 pieces, an expansion for your iPod Nano and a sensor for your shoe. It tracks how far and fast you walk or run and how many calories you have burned. The sensor sends data to the expansion piece connected to your iPod Nano and the iPod Nano stores the data. All this while you are listening to your favorite songs while running around. The next time you dock your iPod it can download all that data and of which you can choose to upload it to the Nike+ Website. There you can store and track your runs as well as set goals for yourself. Rasmus even wrote a php script that processed the data so he could keep track of his runs as well and display it on his toys page. Rasmus went into a lot of detail in his first post about it, so I highly suggest checking it out if you are interested. He later blogged in January saying that he had completed *”100 runs” for a total of 620 miles and burned off a total of 80,000 calories! He basically said that he went from a 205lb fat slow geek to a 175lb slow geek. Whether it was just from the running or whatever else, that is an impressive weight loss in just 5 months!

It is important that if you decide to invest into one of these as well, be sure to not get suckered into the Nike+ shoes. You do not have to have the Nike+ shoes in order to use this. There are plenty of cases out there designed to weave the sensor through your laces and have no loss of proper sensing. The Nike+ shoe puts the sensor in the sole of the shoe, but a pair of these can run you $100! Unless you have the money to spend for the cool looking shoes, just go with the sensor case.

So David Culpepper of PureBlogging.com sent me a couple emails yesterday and today showing me that my new iPod Nano will be arriving tomorrow. I can’t wait to play with my new toy and I am really excited to try out this Nike+, after all, I’m a fat slow geek

[*note: Rasmus’ website is down for whatever reason at the time of this post, however these are normally valid links. I really really hope that he has not decided to stop his personal site!].