I Believe It's Jogging Or Yogging. It Might Be A Soft J

"I'm not sure but apparently you just run for an extended period of time. It's supposed to be wild." Bless you anchorman for making our irrelevant lives so colourful!

So the other month I (foolishly?) took up jogging. What does this have to do with Gardening or Mobile Technology you ask? Well if you had a big enough garden I guess you could jog around that? No not really, although you could. I was interested in finding an inexpensive way of tracking the jogging that I was doing. I was not sure if it would be a fad or if I would continue so I didn't really want to spend a load of cash on it.

At about the time I started jogging a Facebook friend of mine started using a product called Runkeeper. I could see his regular updates on Facebook about runs he had done, specifying the time and distance. Yes a company that implemented a sharing use case on Facebook! How radical I say. Who on earth would think that would work? Piggy backing on a site that has 500 million users? Crazy...

Anyway spurred on by his regular updates I checked out the iPhone app, and subsequently the Android app. you specify your exercise, push the start button and run away! The application uses the handset GPS in order to track your location regularly, such that it can calculate the distance and speed travelled. At the end of your run you can see the distance travelled, time run and speed. There is also a map view allowing you to see exactly where you have run.

Despite being absolutely dejected the first time I used it, due to the minimal distances I was covering, quickly I was able to see the improvement in distances and times. It became a spur to keep on running.

I really love the application, and tied with the web service based at Runkeeper you can track distances covered and see improvements week by week, or in the case of this past month for me, see when I stopped running when I was on holiday!

There is a paid for version of the application, which I admit I have not purchased yet, but the free version is exactly what I was looking for. Cannot rate it high enough.

Of course you do have to run around with your iPhone in your hand, but that is a small price to pay, for me, in order to be able to track what I am doing.

There are many other running applications for both iPhone and Android. This one was the first one I found, thanks to them implementing the sharing use case on Facebook ;-). I cannot vouch for the others but this one works really well for me. If you are a part time runner who wants to see how well you are getting on I highly recommend this.

cheers and happy yogging ;-)