Nike+ is teh sexy

ORN: I ran five kilometers around the 'hood in 33:38. I know this because I finally broke down and bought a Nike+ sport kit and a shoe pouch to put it in.

The first thing to remember about the Nike+ sensor is that there is a right way and a wrong way to install it. Last night, on my run, I was extremely disappointed with the lack of accuracy I was getting. I knew I should have calibrated it before my first run, but I was impatient to try it out. Besides, I heard it was still reasonably accurate out of the box. It is so long as you have it right side up. With about a mile to go, I stooped down, flipped the sensor over, and slapped my forehead with every accurately-measured footfall all the way back home.

So my first workout is going to be whacked, but from now on, I think I am going to be pleasantly pleased with the little gizmo. Like anything having to do with an iPod, the interface is extremely simple. I selected the distance I wanted to run, though I could have selected a timed run or something more open-ended, and sped away. Since I was doing a 5K, at every kilometer, a friendly female voice told me "two kilometers completed" and if I pressed the center button, she would tell me my distance and pace. Very cool. The display showed the distance in big characters, and in a smaller typeface, it showed the current song and the elapsed time. Nice.

Since I was a dumbass and forgot my cable, I cannot report on the data synchronization process with iTunes and nike.com. I will have to do that another day, and I can do that without worries because the Nike+ stores the last thousand workouts in memory until I upload them. Then it still stores the last several.

To do: figure out how to get Nike+ information to post here on the blog.