Matt Gets Running

See­ing as my snow­bound exer­cise regime is so lim­ited at the moment, I figured I’d post some news about the iPhone app that got me star­ted with running!

I hadn’t done any proper exer­cise for a couple of years. I’d given up kar­ate fol­low­ing a snow­board­ing injury that kept me out of the dojo for six months, and an optician’s warn­ing that I was at risk of detached ret­ina, so I shouldn’t  “do any­thing stu­pid like tak­ing up boxing.”

Then my friend Ben­john asked me to put a quick web­site together for his first iPhone app, called Get Run­ning. Based on Josh Clarke’s “Couch to 5K” plan (“C25K” for short), it’s designed to get people run­ning from scratch. I wrote some mar­ket­ing for Ben­john, played with the applic­a­tion a bit — then pretty much decided that if I was going to be involved with the pro­ject, I should really, you know, run.

So, back in July, I star­ted fol­low­ing the plan. The thing I most liked about Get Run­ning was that it was simple. Everything was done for you. You kicked off whatever music you thought would get you going, star­ted the app, and pressed the “Run” but­ton. After that, you just fol­lowed the instruc­tions. The nice voice (Ben­john got his friend Clare into a record­ing stu­dio, I think) told you to walk for five minutes to warm up, so you walked. It told you to start run­ning, you star­ted run­ning. It told you you were halfway through this bit of run­ning, you were grate­ful. It told you to switch back to walk­ing for a while, you walked.

At the halfway point, it told you to turn around, so you turned around and headed back home, all the time guided and encour­aged by the voice. In the first release of the app, the instruc­tions were a little dif­fi­cult to hear over the music, so Ben­john worked on that, and it now fades the music down, speaks to you, and fades the music back up. It’s really slick.

And at the end of the run, it would update its little “Pro­gress Path”, a sweet scrol­lable graphic at the bot­tom of the app’s home screen, and show you how far along the plan you’d got, and which day would be best to run next.

Because Get Run­ning did everything else for me, all I needed to do was get out on the days it told me to get out, and do exactly what it told me to do. And before I knew it, on the first of Octo­ber last year, I’d fin­ished the C25K plan. I was a run­ner. Or at the very least, I was a jogger!

And that’s how I got star­ted. Since then, I’ve run 10K in train­ing at least twice, I’ve learned to run up stu­pidly long, steep hills, and I’ve entered my first race. I’m fit­ter, I’ve lost some weight (I would say I’d lost half a stone, but Christ­mas helped me put some of it back on!) and I’ve taken at least a couple of really good pho­tos that I wouldn’t oth­er­wise have got, because I’d have been sit­ting on my back­side at home, rather than jog­ging past the Clifton Sus­pen­sion Bridge, or around Durd­ham Down.

Today Ben­john released a new ver­sion of Get Run­ning on the iTunes Store. It does everything the old one does, but has some bug fixes and a cool new fea­ture — it can post status updates to Twit­ter and Face­book, too. You can edit the status text before send­ing it off, and you can even have it use whatever Twit­ter cli­ent you prefer using on your iPhone, if you do that sort of thing.

I don’t think this is just a gim­mick — pub­lic com­mit­ment and pub­lic updates of your pro­gress are a great way to keep your­self going. That’s the reason I star­ted this blog in the first place!

So, if you’re think­ing about start­ing run­ning, even if you’ve never run a step in your life, then Get Run­ning! It got me star­ted, and I loved the feel­ing of run­ning my first 5K. At £1.19, on the UK store, at least, it seems like a bargain.