Since I hadn’t been running hardly at all during 2014 I haven’t used MapMyRun in a long time. Back in December I opened it up again and started to log some workouts and treadmill jogs. A years worth of updates meant that I had to re-educate myself on how to use the darn thing. Aside from a variety of new functions and social networking capabilities was the addition of group challenges.
Companies sponsor, as advertisement, an opt-in fitness challenge. Britta, for example, challenged you to log 50000 steps per week and, of course, record how often you hydrated. Each challenge has it’s own exercise and nutrition goal. While the social networking aspect of MMR is nice, it sort of requires that you have lots of friends using the app. I don’t have very many, so the buddy training aspect of the app is a bit lost on me. By contrast, these large community challenges I find a bit more engaging as you can get a percentile rating for your progress relative to all MMR challenge users. If you’re really into competition there is a leader board you can check for each challenge. It’s nice but I call a little BS on it at the same time. After one day of a challenge this guy had logged five 30 minute workouts and 8 supplementations. Come on man, you worked out for 2.5 hours, probably a run, and ate your vitamins for the day plus maybe a shake or something.
The running total for theses different target goals I like as well, keeping track of different variables each month is more fun than just checking off ‘workout’ in my planner. It’s not like you are married to the thing either, the Britta challenge for example didn’t really work for me since I couldn’t find a way to log my steps all day and sync to the app. Oh well, I still checked my steps anyways and entered my hydration stats as well. I know I did better than the app was able to record and that was good enough for me.
In February I changed to the MapMyFitness App to more accurately record my workouts since Kettlebells aren’t in the MMR list. MapMyFitness still records runs the same way including all my old routes, accesses the challenges, and links to your friends just like MMR.
Lots of folks use the wristband things, but I find them pretty limited in capability. The MapMy apps, I feel, are more comprehensive in what you can do with them plus there are all kinds of add ons if you pay to become an MVP member (I am not). There is a whole family of MapMy apps and I recommend that you check them out to enhance your workouts.
Almost forgot, oranges are good for you but don’t really enhance your running much. MapMyRun is better than oranges.
Me and my iPhone
Working on 45 minutes continuous jogging right now. Hope to be close to an hour by April. My buddy Jack is running Bloomsday for the first time so he’s been running a little bit with me. That should be fun and will also keep me from pushing too hard for a goal time this year.
The iPhone is tired of playing the same playlists. Need some new stuff badly. suggestions are welcome.