[DonkeyKongSr]

Treadmill Trip Report

Just got back from the gym and the treadmill. My usual 24 Hour Fitnesses let the treadmills go to 99 minutes + 2 minute cooldown and that's what I usually do. I'm a hiker/backpacker as an occassional hobby, so my workout is more about walking inclines with runs mixed in. It's actually got so much variety that it's a great test of the Nike+.

My workout:
3.5-4.0 MPH, 3 minute segments at different inclines as follows:
7.5 incline -> 10.0 -> 12.5 -> 15.0 -> 12.5 -> 10.0 -> 7.5
Then I go to a run at 6.0-7.0 MPH with no incline, usually for 3 minutes or a little longer if I feel like it. Then I start the whole process over. This cycle will go almost 4 times in the 99 minutes.

My Results:
The time isn’t 100% accurate because I lost some time in the middle of my workout when I found out you can’t change music without it pausing (more on that later) and then added some time after the workout I forgot to stop the iPod until I walked over to the water fountain.

My workout registered as 6.91 miles in 1:41:31. The treadmill read 7.07 miles in 1:41:00. That only 2.26% off. Very acceptable variance. Huge thumbs up from me.

Power Song
This feature is actually much cooler than I thought. My song today was Linkin Park/Jay Z’s Points of Authority/99 Problems/One Step Closer mashup. The song is almost 5 minutes long. I recommend longer songs to keep you pumped up longer. To play the song, you hold down the center button for second or two and it starts up (you set it to whatever you want before a run). How well did it work to pump me up? Well, I suck at running and I usually just do the 3 minutes of running in this workout and not much more. Today I did the entire 5 minutes of the song with no problems. It helped that I went to that song from listening to the much more mellow Johnny Cash the rest of the time, but it should still get you going if you pick the right songs.

Changing Music
Alright, this is the part that sucks. After awhile I wanted to stop listening to Johnny Cash, so I went to the menu and went to “Change Music”. It paused my workout. That sucked. Then I tried to change my music. Well, I had no luck because you can’t go to the main menu without stopping the workout and on the workout menu your only choice for music changes are playlists. The problem is I have zero playlists because I have 30 GB of music and a 4 GB player, so I’m constantly swapping music. I guess I’ll have to start making some quick playlists so I have options on my runs. Annoying, but if you prepare yourself for runs, not a huge problem.

Final Thoughts
Highly recommended. About as accurate as you can expect from a non-GPS enabled pedometer. It’s going to get me motivated to do more outdoor runs. Living in SoCal, it’s too nice outside not to take advantage. As a hiker, I’m going to love finally knowing approximately how long my hikes are. I really am going to love this thing. The big problem still is the [censored] website. I was going to put the image of the run in this post, but the site is letting me do everything but look at my individuals runs. They need to get the bugs out of the site big time.