Exercise for the technophile

I just ran across a pretty cool piece of technology from Nike called Nike+ which has inspired this entry. I’m sure many of you are all familiar with a device called a pedometer, it counts each step that you take. A lot of people wear them and attempt to take a certain number of steps every day which I imagine is doctor recommended. Kellogg’s recently had a marketing campaign involving giving pedometers (provided in the cereal box) to kids to get them exercising. I’m sure it failed rather miserably since the consoles from Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft are quite a bit more fun than incrementing a number by skipping rope or whatever.

The iPod is becoming pretty ubiquitous for those that can afford it. Many companies have realized this and are starting to bring out devices that attach their brand onto the iPod. Nike+ is one such device. Nike realizes that music is as important to us as their shoe and clothing products so they are trying to utilize music to improve sales. To participate you will need an iPod, the Nike+ sport kit and Nike+ ready shoes. The sport kit comes with an insert that goes into the Nike+ ready shoes to monitor your footfalls. There is also a connector for your iPod that wirelessly receives data and can give you updates on your progress (via voice over). When you finish your run you plug the iPod into the computer and your run data is uploaded to the Nike site. The site tracks your runs over time so you can see your progress and the stats from each individual run historically.

It certainly is very similar to making the number on the pedometer go up but at a much higher technology level. I would love to get my hands on this stuff to test it out but it is too much $$ for me; maybe next summer. I would be curious about the longevity of the shoe insert, putting technology in such a high stress location is bound to be problematic. Combining music and the cool factor of this device would certainly get me out running more often. Does anybody have this? I’d like to hear what you think of them.