Telephone

This year, for  Mother's Day, Hubs upgraded my standard issue cell phone to an iPhone 4.   Thank goodness just about every single one of my friends has an iPhone and have been kind enough to guide me, otherwise I'd have to put on my glasses to read the directions.  The Crack Phone, I mean, the iPhone is rather addictive.  There's so much stuff on it and so much stuff to add to it that it's ridiculous.  There are apps for just about everything.  There are apps that you need that you didn't know you needed.  I realize that I'm somewhat late to the tech party with an iPhone, but now I understand the novelty turning into a necessity.



On my prior cell phone I had an app for tracking runs.  It was Bones in Motion, a GPS enabled run tracking app which I used for all of my runs.  It was user friendly, easy to adjust/correct GPS malfunctions, and had the best graphics and charts.   Tech support was awesome.  They even called me to follow up on an issue I had with live tracking.  I thought I was sneaky and did not need to buy a Garmin. Unfortunately, Bones in Motion was bought out by another company, was interfaced with a different brand, was not compatible with my cell phone, and did not offer the same type of stats, graphics and charts.  I was bummed.  With my new iPhone I discovered I could use the GPS capabilities to track my runs again if I ever forgot my Garmin.  There are several run tracking apps for iPhone.  I went with Nike+ GPS.

By today's standards, I am not very tech savvy.  The 7 year old in my life knows more about computers and techy stuff  than I do. I figured Nike+GPS would work right out of the box, um, right after the upload.  I used it for the first time on Saturday for our track club's 2 hour run.  I hit the start button and placed it in my Spibelt  and went about my run.  When I returned from my run I  took the phone out of my Spibelt and noticed that it said something like 14.7 miles in 2 hours. At this current point in time, 14.7 miles in 2 hours would be a miracle.  With all the injuries I went through last year and purposely backing off speed this year, I'd be happy with 10 miles in 2 hours.  I had no idea that the Nike app needed to be calibrated, and I couldn't figure out why it added mileage.  After returning home and mapping out my run manually, I discovered that I actually went a little over 11 miles and was able to calibrate the run to accommodate the time I put in.  Upon further inspection of the route I ran, I discovered a ton of GPS bouncing, which gave me the 14.7 miles.

Once I was at my computer at home, I expected to go to the nikeplus.com site and see my stats.  I thought, through the magic of GPS and my new iPhone, that my stats would automatically appear on the site upon logging in. Nope. In addition, I couldn't sync my stats to Dailymile no matter what I tried.  I spent  most of my Sunday afternoon playing e-mail tag with Stephen at Nike+GPS tech support. Stephen at tech support and I were quickly building a relationship.  I was beginning to think the app was a lost cause and I began looking into other GPS run apps.  Finally, after several different ways of resetting and rebooting, it worked.

Yay.

If I could just get my home computer to work properly, then I'd really be living large.

Song from Thursday, May 12, 2011:
To Make a Long Story Short -  Gladys Knight and the Pips

PEACE