When I was a teen I hated to run.
I mean, not only I hated it, but also I was bad at it, really.
To tell you I how bad I was, imagine that the year of my graduation, at the final sport test, I finished last, far behind a guy who suffered from overweight and knee's arthritis.
Hearing this, you must think that I must be exagerating or that I had a particular disorder preventing me to run but that's not true: I was perfectly fit, weighting 85 kilos for 1,80 meter, practicing other sports, I and what I write is not exagerated at all.
Between my graduation and my first ten years of work, I almost never ran, because I thought that was impossible - I took some weight, at some point I passed the hundred of kilos. At the end of 2006, I did a medical check-up and noticed I my heart rate was at 90+ bpm at rest which is a bit high.
At this point I had the pure motivation. But when I look back, to see how it went I have to assess that my progress have been guided by a lot of gadgets and technology.
- Early 2005, I Bought my first iPod, that was a mini. I think nothing of below would have happened without this iPod.
- Then I Discovered Jiwok a very cool service for runners providing free MP3 training programs. I loved it immediatly when I loaded it the first time on my iPod. Maybe that was because of the voice of Denis and the choice of cool tracks.
- As a person obsessed with the idea of tracking progress and because of my heart rate, I bought an heart rate monitor - I highly suggest that you buy one if you start running as it let you run against your heart rather against any other criteria. Personnaly I went with the cheapest Polar and now I bought a Polar RS100 (100 euros) which let me record lap times (usefull when you run on track)
- Nothing to do with the running, Apple launched its Nano, which made my iPod Mini look like a Hummer - I cracked and bought a cool black iPod Nano.
At this point I was able to run 45 minutes, 2 times a week, and I began to like it, but being at almost 100Kilos, running is not particularly rewarding.
- Early 2007, I heard about Nike+, a small device work that record your distance and speed, stores it on your iPod, and let you sync the data to a Nike Web site where you can again track your progress, define objectives and also participate to user defined challenges
- End of 2007, my son Tom was born, and I stopped running activity until may this year.
- I think that was in July, I felt on a blog post from Maxime proposing to start a running challenge between french Web entrepreneurs, I immediatly bought a Nike+ (30 Euros but you need a nano, if you don't have one, consider buying a sportband) and jumped in the challenge. The winner of the challenge would be the participant who would run the more miles during a period of 30 days.
- With this Nike+ and during my last vacations, I bought a pair of Nike Air Zoom Vomero II, with a special socket for the nike device (120 Euros). During the vacations I began to run about every day or at least 4 times a week, for times between 1h00 and 1h30 and distances between 5 and 15 kilometers.
Conclusion:
- The challenge ended a few days ago and I've managed to run 122 kilometers in one month. I finished second behind mr Boo who is really impressing. During the last week, I've seen my heart rate falling to 145-150 to 130-135 when I run slowly. I run so much that I feel addicted it to it. When I go for a run in the morning, I want to go back in the evening ;)
- If you're like me, obsessed by the idea of tracking progress, if you don't like running or think you're not capable of running, you should try those little gadgets and technologies, they'll surely help.
But because those gadgets would be nothing without people Special thanks to Denis, the voice of Jiwok, Maxime for having had the idea of launching the challenge and Bertrand Soulier, because I think that's in on of his posts that I discovered Jiwok two years ago, and Mr Boo who inspired the title of this article.
Ah, another thing, did I tell you I hated doing push-ups ? Really ?
