Nike+ missing voice prompts

Sometimes I find that my Nike+ kit (which I’m using with a 4th gen iPod Nano) will fail to provide spoken feedback on a run.

This either happens from the outset: it fails to play the usual “walk around” prompt to find/pair with the shoe sensor, yet will still find it if you do indeed walk around; or will fail during a run after playing some initial prompts “walk around”, “1km completed” etc only to then fall over and stop playing any future prompts. This more than likely means that you’ll be running hard thinking that the second km is taking much longer than the first and generally leading to intense frustration. While run data is still recorded as normal, you’re missing one the most compelling features of using the Nike+ kit.

How to prevent this

Before running, I will always perform a reset. After following these instructions, iPod will restart and - in my experience - Nike+ will work as expected with no missing voice prompts.

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Still running

September was the biggest month yet, mainly getting some extra training in before I ended up subjecting myself to the Sydney Running Festival Half-Marathon.

I didn’t actually find the HM too bad, with all those people around and everyone pretty much keeping pace, I didn’t once feel an overwhelming desire to quit running and break into a walk. I was pretty tired afterwards, my legs/knees were a little sore, copped some hefty blisters on both my big toes and I think I’ve lost a nail on one toe, apart from that - not too bad :D

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Running redux

A little late to the party, I just realised that there’s a new Nike+ website with an all new design and much improved performance - so time to update the shots of my stats. See my previous post for the before shots.

Everything is themed in orange due to my Nike+ “level” being the second tier where I’ve logged more than 49K (yellow level) and less than 250K (green). Two more kilometers and it’s into the green.

There’s also a new social feature that allows you to add friends and share your profile - so here’s mine.

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I went for a run

Usually not one to feel the need to participate in any kind of organised exercise I decided back in January to start running to get myself fit, after all, one needs to be prepared at all times in case called upon to make one’s Formula 1 debut…

One of the first things I did was invest in some decent shoes and gear, shoes in particular making all the difference. Being an information and statistics junkie, I also picked up a Nike+ kit to keep tabs on my running. After using it for a couple of weeks, I found it was also brilliant for staying motivated to try and beat my personal best time and distances whenever possible. At first I found that it wasn’t very accurate though after a couple of different attempts at callibrating it eventually started tracking distances with a fair degree of accuracy.

I’ve included a couple of sample graphs that are provided by the Nike+ service. Top one shows my run log, bottom one showing a recent run that happened to take my total distance covered since January past 125kms.

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