This evening Maggie and I hit the gym for a quick workout. I got to use the Nike + Sports pack for the first (real) time and I’m impressed.

On Thursday I picked up a Switch Easy RunAway which allows me to use the Nike + accelerometer on any pair of shoes. It cost $20 from NextByte in Carousel and was exactly what I was chasing.

My problems previously were centred around the fact that I not only had the sensor tucked into my show precariously, but it was upside down. I later found that this was a major problem :) This time the device was accurate to within 30m over the 4km distance which is pretty damn good. I first calibrated it over a 400m run, which explains this accuracy, though it was pretty good “out of the box”.

In interesting news, Rasmus Lerdorf also has one and he’s written a PHP5 class that you can use to interact with your run data. This would be more useful if Nike didn’t provide such a great Flash application already, but as they do, I can’t think of any really useful purpose I have for the class… yet.

Judging by Rasmus’ running pace I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me. He runs a mile in the same time it takes me to do a kilometre!