Fitness 2.0

As many of you know I’m on a health and fitness kick. I’ve tried to get back in shape (meaning healthy not chiseled abdominals heh) several times in the past and I’ve consistently failed miserably. More often than not its because going to the gym is super boring. This time I’m making the process of getting healthy again into a personal video game. The idea is that if I’m always trying to beat my high score i’ll have more fun than just doing exercise for the sake of it.

Weapons of choice for nerding out my workouts:

I do this mainly by using my GPS when I do outdoor activities like running, cycling, and snowboarding. When I get back home from the outings I then upload my metrics into Motionbased. After that I can see speeds, elevation, heart rate etc. I can even look at my tracks on Google Earth and Google Maps. The image above is a screenshot of run I did the other day as seen on Google Earth.

Its much more fun to doing these activities knowing that you can look at how fast you went, how far you ran, or how hard you worked. Over time I’ve been able to see my heart rate go down while my speeds and distances increase. You might think this is a fairly expensive undertaking but I consider it an investment in my health. What could be more important to you than your own health? Of course gym memberships are pricey as well. If you’re not into the geeky bits you could always just use a stop watch, a map and check your pulse but then wheres the fun in that?!

Mathew Honan has an article in Wired along these same lines in the February 2007 issue.

Update: Here are some more tracks/examples etc.

Update 2: FYI – spell checking and proof reading your blog posts is always advisable when you post something late at night. Sorry about that original post.

Update 3: I guess this is my version of fatblogging ;)