Week 5 With Nike+ SportWatch GPS

Another good training week with the Nike+ GPS watch. The screen, simple controls and accuracy of the GPS remain to be the strength of this watch.

This week I got to really feel the pressure of the Goals feature of the Nike+ website. It was the final week for my 2 Nike+ Goals. One was distance and one was for speed.

I had reached the speed goal earlier in the week and I was congratulated when I synced the watch by and elite athlete, that was nice . The distance goal, on the other hand, seemed out of reach. The distance goal was in my head from preparation and well into my long run this morning. As the run progressed the idea of one more mile for the goal motivated me. After doing this mental exercise 3 times the goal was met and the run was that much more fulfilling.

This type of motivation, like a good running partner, was amazing. Tomorrow new goals will be set, and I look forward to hearing the next athlete sing my praises for achieving those goals.

Week 4 with Nike+ SportWatch GPS

Sorry I missed last week. There was a race on Sunday that ended at a brewery, and well, you can connect the dots (the Boilermaker is a great race if you can ever get out to Utica for it).

The watch performed like a champ at the race and for all training runs before and since the race, but the lack of heart rate zone “alerts” is a little bit of a downer. It was nice when when my watch would tell me where I was with respect to hear rate. The screen on the Nike+ GPS watch is great for reading it, but having the ability to set and be notified of your changing heart rate zones is a very nice feature.

The Nike+ site does a nice job of making you aware of heart rate, and even the zones to an extent so I’m surprised this was not a feature of the watch. I would guess this could be added as a software update at a later date, so I think I might start lobbying.

Have a great week all.

Week 2 With Nike+ SportWatch GPS

Having this watch for a second week, I have come to appreciate the simplicity of this device as a distance tool and run recorder. I wear the watch as a timepiece as well which brings some comments from both runners and non-runners alike.

Life got in the way of many of my runs over the week, but that’s just life . Today I went on my first run in a new place, and the watch performed like a champ. I had no worries about going to long and missing breakfast with my wife, heart rate was nails and another run was recorded.

This run was a quite nice up and back on the Saratoga Lake. It was a beautiful scene with a light mist above  the water and perfect running temperature. I I’m sorry there’s no picture, my cell phone was dead this morning, but please take my word for it.

The one disappointing aspect of the logging of the runs is that Nike+ no longer syncs with the Nike Training Log. I have been using the Nike Training Log site to record my runs since I started running. I use this log for 2 reasons: 1. My running partner told me I needed to log my runs and 2: the Nike Training Log provides a place to record many aspects of your run and as an early adopter of the Nike+ system years ago, after some writing into the Nike+ forums, there was automatic integration of your Nike+ data into your Nike Training Log. I have ~5years of running data in the Nike+ Training Log, and it’s fun and or educational to refer back to certain moments in time  for training purposes. We will see how this plays out, I hope to get the integration to the Training Log again, for now I am still doing manual entries (I’m back on the forums again , we’ll see what happens).

Until next week.