FitLifeSF

Folks who have been following my somewhat recent infatuation with running will remember that it was PodFitness that made me realize I could run, enjoy it, post some nice times and burn some serious calories. If you need a refresher, read my mixed review of PodFitness here.

For those who want the Cliff’s Notes version: I thought it was a solid program with some major bugs and in no way worth what they were charging, especially for someone who just wants to mix a few interval running workouts per week, not intensive hand-holding or a “class-per-day” workout download.

Enter Nike+, which I’ve had for officially a week now. I am pretty much in love with this thing.

Yes, it has some limitations. For example, how hard would it be for them to make a program that guides intervals for you? Say, 5 minute warm-up, one minute interval, 2 minute recovery, repeat x4, etc. In fact, how difficult would it be for them to let me set my own times, just drag and drop onto a timeline. You would just need a vocal that says, “Start Interval” and “Start Recovery.” Currently, the best ways to do intervals are either to set your system for kilometers and do slightly longer intervals as it alerts you on kilometers run, do true “fartlek” (speed play) by picking a point in the distance and sprinting there, or setting up your playlist in such a way that there are either fast songs sandwiched by slower songs (or songs with well-defined choruses that you can sprint through– Like, say, “Chorus,” by Erasure.) Of course, doing all your interval workouts on a track would make it easy as well, but not everyone has that luxury. Even with these work-arounds, I would still love to be able to track things like max distance traveled in a 30-second sprint or fastest 400 meter interval, etc. To my knowledge, this is not possible.

It would also be quite simple to integrate a heartrate monitor into the system and they’ve not yet done that (though rumor has it the Nike+ SportBand, which lets you use all but the music/audio features of the Nike+ without an iPod, has a heart icon on its display, leading some to believe a monitor is in the works.)

The #1 thing that Nike+ has that totally blows PodFitness out of the water is community. There is the Nike+ community where you can enter challenges and such and also a thriving community at RunnerPlus that brings together people who use the Nike+ and the really cool kids who use the Garmin GPS-enabled training devices together.

Here’s the breakdown:

So, for my money… the Nike+ is by far the better solution for a person looking to use their iPod as a training tool.  Now, I just need to get me a Garmin and see how that stacks up to the Nike+!