aw basics

Music to our ears

Nike+ has put a spring in the step of AW’s entrants to the BUPA Great North Run

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MUCH is written about making your preparation for an athletics event as effective as possible. Rarely, though, is any attention given to making your build-up enjoyable.

That is exactly what Nike+ does, though. It might not make you get from A to B any quicker, but when it comes to enhancing the pleasure of a run it is unbeatable.

This is what AW’s editor Jason Henderson has found during recent weeks as both he and Jessica Anstee, the winner of a Nike+ competition in this magazine, have prepared for the BUPA Great North Run on September 29 using Nike+ technology.

In short, Nike+ involves a small computer chip in your running shoe which communicates with an iPod. As you run, the iPod and chip work in synchrony and in addition to listening to your music you hear updates relating to the time, distance and speed of your run.

Later, when the training session is over, you plug your iPod into your PC and the iPod automatically downloads the information from the training run into the Nike+ website. And the website then acts as a virtual running diary, with details of all your training sessions.

What’s more, there are loads of superb features that make Nike+ entertaining as well as functional. For instance, the graphics that display your training runs on the website – nikeplus.com – are magnificently detailed.

Another great feature is the power song, where you can listen to your favourite song at a crucial stage of a run in order to give yourself a boost. (What did I say about not making you faster? Maybe I was wrong.)

In addition to this, I was given a pleasant surprise recently when Lance Armstrong unexpectedly told me at the end of a session: “Congratulations! That was your longest training run yet.”

Related to this, if you get tired of your own music then you can download the favourite playlists of Tour de France cyclist Armstrong or marathon world record-holder Paula Radcliffe, via iTunes.

Then there are ‘challenges’. Currently, a team of Nike+ competitors preparing for the BUPA Great North Run are in a challenge to see who can run the most miles in the final few weeks before the race. Everyone in the challenge, including Jason and Jessica, sees their personal training run stats automatically transferred to produce, in this case, a rankings table leaderboard.

At the time of going to press, AW’s editor currently sits in fifth place. But his excuse is that not many miles were logged during the World Championships in Osaka and, of course, it’s what matters on September 29 that counts the most!

► IF you have an iPod Nano and Nike shoes that can house a Nike+ chip, then the Nike+ chip itself costs only £20. From then on, everything is free – including all the features on the website. For more details, see www.nikeplus.com