Matt Gets Running

Today, for the first time, I didn’t use Get Run­ning. I’ve only got a few runs left in the C25K pro­gramme, so I figured I’d play with Run­Keeper, one of my options for con­tin­ued geek­i­ness after I check all of the little boxes on Get Running’s “pro­gress path”.

Run­Keeper is one of the best iPhone run­ning apps. I don’t see it as a com­pet­itor to Get Run­ning; they’re dif­fer­ent applic­a­tions, for dif­fer­ent users.

Get Run­ning does one thing — gets a begin­ner run­ning from scratch. And it does it extremely well.

Run­Keeper is more general-purpose, and pro­gram­mable, uses the GPS, links in with a web site, and does all man­ner of other clever things.

Run­Keeper has a higher learn­ing curve. There’s just a lot more to it, so it’s neces­sar­ily more dif­fi­cult to get star­ted with. Get Run­ning effect­ively does one thing, and has one but­ton, marked “Run!”, in large friendly letters.

Run­Keeper needs you to turn off your WiFi (oth­er­wise it might use the less accur­ate pos­i­tion­ing inform­a­tion instead of the GPS), pro­gram your exer­cise your­self, if you’re fol­low­ing a plan, and start­ing off seems to involve push­ing a few more but­tons. Plus you’ve got to remem­ber to stop it at the end.

(Also, RunKeeper’s syn­thes­ised voice prompts have noth­ing on the lovely, human, encour­aging voice of Clare, who recor­ded the voice prompts for Get Running!)

But, when you get to the stage where the runs are just a half-hour of run­ning, and you want to know a bit more about your pace, your pro­gress, and how far you’re run­ning, Run­Keeper can make a very con­fid­ent entrance into your train­ing plan.

So, before I set off today, I pro­grammed Run­Keeper with the Week 8, Run 3 run of the C25K — care­fully put­ting in two con­sec­ut­ive 14-minute runs, rather than one long 28-minute run, so I’d know when the halfway point was — and set off.

Today I’d decided to push my pace up a bit, to see just how far I could get in my 28 minutes. One Run­Keeper fea­ture I par­tic­u­larly like is a mode where if you tap the screen, it’ll tell you how you’re doing — your time, dis­tance, and cur­rent pace.

This means there’s no need to crane your neck to fig­ure out where you are in your run, or whether your pace has dropped off. I just slapped my conveniently-armbanded iPhone and the voice intoned my stats.

Any­way. Here’s the killer fea­ture of Run­Keeper, and why it’s called Run­Keeper — the web­site integ­ra­tion. I’d cre­ated an account on runkeeper.com. I fin­ished my run, hit RunKeeper’s “stop” but­ton, told it I wanted to record my run, and by the time I was back indoors, it had been auto­mat­ic­ally uploaded to the web­site, and I could see it mapped out. And, even more hoopy, I can share it, like this:

Got to say, that’s pretty cool. And look — I’m doing pretty damn well! That’s 4.18km in 28 minutes, at an aver­age pace of 6:45 per kilo­meter. That’s fast, for me, by the way

I’m going to use Get Run­ning for the final week of the C25K, rather than Run­Keeper — Get Run­ning is easier to use, pret­tier, and the voice prompts are much nicer (and play­back is slicker — Get Run­ning fades the music down, speaks, then fades the music back up. Run­Keeper just merges in with the music, mak­ing it dif­fi­cult to hear.)

After that, I’m going to have to explore my options for get­ting up to 10K. Run­Keeper will def­in­itely be on the shortlist.