GeekySports

Jump to Comments

Although this tracking gadget may be already a little old for you, this is one of my favourites:

The Nike + iPod Sport Kit!

This blogpost is for those of you, who are not very familiar with this gadget!

What you need is:

• An iPod Nano of any Generation
  (1st G is supported, too!)
• Nike + iPod Sport Kit

With the purchase of the Nike + iPod Sport Kit you’ll get a sensor, which sends the running data to the receiver (which is also in the box). Here you can see how the receiver looks like with an iPod Nano 2nd G (German menu):

In my opinion the receiver looks “all right” with the iPod nano. But now let’s move to the more complicated part:

Attaching the receiver to your running shoes

You might consider buying Nike shoes, which are Nike + compatible. Then you can simply put your sensor in a hole below the sole and everything should work fine. No extra bags or so.
But for those of you, who don’t like Nike shoes for running, you can buy an extra small bag with Velcro so that it holds strong when you’re running. Usually the price of these bags should not exceed 5-10 USD.

I tried such a bag for a few month, but after buying new shoes I just fixed them with scoth tape and surprisingly it still works fine and does not fall down during long runs.

I would try the original Nike shoes myself, if they had my size. Here in Germany, they stop at US 14. Unfortunately for me and for Nike they won’t fabricate sizes > US 14.

Menu and Handling

After you plugged the receiver in your nano an extra menu named “Nike+iPod” appears. Here you can see how it looks like:

↑ Here you can start a new training, change settings and look in your running history.

↑ Here you can preselect, which distance you want to run

↑ Here you can preselect how long you want to run

↑ This is the history menu, in which you can look into your past runs.

↑ This is the setting menu.

In most cases, I select “basic” because I do not want to limit my run to a certain length. But for runners, who want to run as fast as they can for let’s say 5km these options are very good.

Running

When the receiver and the sensor are at the right place, you can start linking the sensor with your iPod. You only have to walka few steps to do this. Actually you can start running immediately, but you might want to calibrate before you make your first run.

You should run an exact distance, at least 400 meters to calibrate.
Search a racetrack nearby where you can measure the exact length. Some say that it’s OK to calibrate on a treadmill but I doubt that the results are very accurate.

After this is done, you can start running!

You should create a playlist before you run, because if you want to change the music during the run, you have to pause and the running data for this time period is gone. If you’re already listening to a playlist or a long album you can chose your current playlist before you start.

More

Of course this is not everything you can do with your iPod + Sport Kit. In times of web 2.0 there should be any community function where you can share your runs with others and start challanges. Nike runs the site where you can do this.
I decided to split these two topics in two blogpost! It will be published shortly and linked here.

If you enjoyed your read, grab my feed