• Graphs that show your progress over time, either with the same route, or how far you manage to run in (example) 60 minutes.
• Map integration. Let me put my runs on a map like on Nike+
• Route playlist planning. Don’t know if that would be useful, but I thought it would be cool if I could put up a map for my run, grab data from previous runs of the same route, mark different sections of the run with a marker (like part 1, part 2 etc), and then drag in songs from iTunes to fit the different parts. Like power songs in the hills, slower stuff when it’s flat etc.
• Some way to integrate the running with iCal. Bitch me if I’m lazy!

If you have any ideas, put them here or in the thread at Flickr. Ditto if you have any good suggestion for other Mac software that uses the data the Nike + iPod collects.

Photographer: Hallgrim Haug Halfilms
Skier: Howie Arnstad Howie

1. “My natural levels are 11 times higher as other people.”
2. “Someone put testosterone in the massage oil.”
3. “We couldn’t come because we had an accident with both motorcycles.”
4. “It was in my vitamins.”
5. “I didn’t know that grandma uses testosterone in her donuts.”
6. “I was jogging through the suburbs when some kids sprayed me with testosterone from a water gun.”
7. “A cat bit me and it must have had higher testosterone levels than legal.”
8. “I always get high testosterone levels after a hot day in the sun. Maybe I should have used suntan?”
9. “I watched Harry Potter with my kids at the movies some days ago, and the guy on the row in front of me smelled funny.”
10. “I visited Tchernobyl in my vacation. Very interesting place. Did you know that everyone had to move from there?”
11. “The butler did it.”
12. “This is unfair!! It’s the newspapers who did it! My doctor! WADA! My teammates! My trainer! My wife! My ex-lover!”
13. “I must have gotten it in that public toilet.”
14. “So you can’t smoke dope and play afterwards? Why is this called the “free world” then? Heh???!!??”
15. “It was God who did it.”
16. “I blame it on the boogie.”
17. “Doh.”
18. “My testosterone levels are high because my girl friend bought new underwear last week.”
19. “I got head-butted by a french, and after that my levels have been sky high.”
20. “My real name is Kent. Clark Kent.”

Add yours below.

Here’s a promise: I will not shop at XXL more. Period.

XXL is a chain of huge shops with sports equipment. They sell shoes, sportswear, bikes, skis, tents, helmets, rackets, balls etc. They have a quite good website at XXL.no where you can buy sports equipment online. Almost every week all households around their shops get a 10-20 pages thick “newspaper” with the latest offers.

XXL claim they’re the cheapest on the market in Norway, and also have the biggest selection (which explains the name).

So far, so good.

Empty

So I get their latest ad, and head off to buy shoes for the kids. Empty. “We’re sold out”, “It was extremely popular”, “It’s saturday” (what??), “We sold many because of the ads” (no really?), “We have lots of them at Sandvika” (30 kms to drive), “We didn’t get enough from the importer”, “It hasn’t arrived yet. You’re too early” (I’m too early????)

I’m so fed up on their lame excuses. The best one was the one I got today: “It’s saturday”. Ok, that explains everything. On friday nights, shoes go into their little shoecaves, deep below the mall, and don’t come out again until monday morning.

Shopping wisdom for free

So to help the managers at XXL and others selling sports equipment, here’s some wisdom from yours truly. It’s for free. And you can copy and paste it and publish it as much as you want.

1. When you advertise a product, people will come to buy it (especially if you put your ad in the mailboxes of 1,5 million people
2. People shop on saturdays. Yes, the day the shops are open, and most people don’t go to work.
3. Some shopping malls have 25% of their weekly sales saturdays between 14 and 18.
4. if your shelves go empty on saturdays, you will lose lots of customers.
5. If your normal trained staff have saturdays off, and all the people working in your shop on saturdays are 14 year old kids, you will also lose lots of customers.
6. Saturdays are chrunchtime. This is where the best show where they are made of, and the loosers loose (XXL has lost every saturday I’ve been there).
7. If you are selling footballshoes (that’s soccer if you’re in the US), you will always sell more of the sizes used by the “first-time players”. Here in Norway most football schools start at 7 or 8, so naturally you will sell more shoes of that size.
8. If you work in a shop that fails to deliver on saturdays, pleeeeease give customers a decent answer. Not “we sold many because of the ads”. Try “sorry, but our shop manager doesn’t know how to plan ahead. I’ll promise to tell him how stupid this is.”

[Rant_mode off]

The Wellness System is made up of hardware, software, and cutting-edge technologies linked to exercise equipment. It enables health and fitness facilities to deliver a rich wellness experience to their members. A comprehensive, modular network, the Wellness System works with exercise equipment.

Using a special TGS key, you “log on” to the equipment you use at the gym. The Wellness System then keeps track of what you do, burned calories, how much you run, how much you lift or pull, and your progress. You can also check your progress online.

Only halfway there

As far as I know the first time you can see your progress in hard numbers, and not just what you think your progress is (and DO people fool themselves? Yes, they do.)

There are however some shortcomings:

It can store “only” 365 workout sessions. I guess that means several years of workouts for most of us, but for athletes it will soon be too little.

Is there a way to measure your pulse? I couldn’t find that on the Technogym site.

You can’t take your data with you. And you can’t use the data from the gym with the data from outside the gym. Let me explain: You run, bicycle and lift in the gym. And your data is stored in the Wellness System. Then you run and bicycle outdoors, and maybe you store your data on a Garmin Forerunner.

How do you combine the data? You can’t. There aren’t any standards. And most of the people busy making new cool standards for the online world are so busy using their computers that they wouldn’t care less if you can’t take your Wellness System data, your Forerunner data and mix them at home. Or online.

We need EMIL

A year ago, I wrote “Running and training online”:

I’m always frustrated with the lack of open standards in the computer world. So to keep up competition, we make a standard for the data that the training machines collect when we train. I call it EMIL – Exercise Machine Interchange Language. It sounds like “e mill” (electronic mill) when you say it. And it’s my little homage to Astrid Lindgren’s wonderful character Emil.

So how about it, Marc? Phil? (who had supercool “/run” but still makes cool stuff at “Make:”. Or Robert?: Your boss seem to understand that we need microformats. We need a format for training! Get people out of their chairs! Hightech training for everyone!

And finally: The view

The next version of Windows is called “Vista”:

vista

1) A distant view or prospect, especially one seen through some opening
2) A site offering such a view

(from Wiktionary)

I want something to look at when running the mill. Ok, at SATS where I workout, they have placed the step machines right in front of the running mills. But everywhere else. I would like to bicycle through Italian wineyards or downtown Sydney. I want to run the streets of Tokyo or the hills around Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Or the landscapes in Halo.

How?

Make a system that takes data from the bicycle or the mill, feed it into my Xbox (or a PS3) and give me the view. Track how fast I go, my pulse, put it online. Let me race my friends all over the world. Give me EMIL support in all chat clients: “Status: Oyvind is bicycling – race him now”. Click and your system give you the same track I see, real time and online. And it works whether I’m at the gym or at the spinning bike at home.

How cool would that be!

Summary

There are three pieces missing:

Data collection
Technogym has started to adress this, by taking data from all machines in gyms, and saving them to a personal profile. Garmin also does it with their Forerunner line, where you store both pulse, elevation, speed, GPS data etc. on the Forerunner.

There are several other areas where this could be done:

• A very light device to put on your arm while playing tennis
• A device for golfers that takes GPS data, how you swing etc. (I would guess this exists already? Anyone?)
• A device for skiers, both Nordic and Alpine. A GPS with customized software would cover most of what you need. I think lots of people would like to see their speed in the slopes, which could be done with GPS. Not too accurate, I guess but good enough. If there was a standard, the Alpine devices could talk to systems in the slopes, feeding them other metadata about the slopes (green, blue, red, black etc.)
• Swimming. Are there heart rate monitors that are waterproof?

Can you think of other useful areas?

A standard for the data
There should be an easy way to move data between devices and systems. It’s lame that my Polar heart rate monitor store it’s data in a different format than Garmin’s heart rate monitors. They should be compatible with each other.

There should be a way to put all the data from Technogym’s Wellness System on a USB stick.

Someone should sit down and define all the data possible to connect: GPS positions, heart rate, how much you lift or push, how far you run/bicycle/ski and so on. And then define a data format for it. Like MIDI for training machines and monitoring.

Using data to control other devices
And finally: When the data is in a format that all kinds of machines and gadgets can understand, it should be possible to use it to control other devices. Example: When I run on a mill, that data should be possible to send to any PC/Mac/Xbox/PS to control things. Anything. It should be built right into the OS. Yes, OS X and Windows Vista should have supoort for this. So that if I want to “disconnect” the return key on my keyboard, and the only way to get a “return” is to hit a punching ball next to my display, I should be able to do it.

And when I’m running on a tread mill, in a gym or at home, I should be able to control any game I have. Or much better: The game developers should make special versions of the games, with “only” the landscapes and buildings, letting users run or bicycle them.

Update
There is a device for alpine, showing vertical speed etc.

Update
I’ve written Training microformat after Apple and Nike presented iPod+Nike in May 2006.

Live broadcasts of gaming on national tv will be huge in 2006..

Yes, tv channels will air live games, with the top gamers of the world playing. With commentators, experts, statistics and interviews.

There are so many reasons for this:

1) Some of the best customers for advertisers play games: Males in the age 15-45, and lately also lots of woman in the same age. Which will make advertisers wanting to have their advertising around these shows.

2) The quality of the games are so good that “normal” people could watch this and enjoy. I can understand that my dad in the early 80s couldn’t figure out which of the tiny pixelated figures on the screen were us, and which were the bad guys.

But now: HD and glorious surround sound. Xbox 360, highend PCs, PS3 and games like Project Gotham Racing 3 makes this very close to the real world (not quite but close).

Add to that: Amazing replays and camera views you never get in “real life”.

3) The way the games are built fit with the way sports are made today: You have tons of statistics, you have people playing games for a living, and thus becoming very good at it.

There are of course some hurdles too: The geek factor, the quality and the development of new tools to make gaming better for tv.

1) The geek factor. The production I’m watching now is quite geeky. They use looots of special words only known to gamers, and try too little to inform normal people about the concepts of the game. The three guys in the studio are the ones you would playing games everywhere: Guys in t-shirts, not too fit, and 2 of 3 had glasses. Heh! But they knew what they were talking about!

2) The quality. This was lowcost production. Two static cameras and the game. If one produced it like an NBA final or a Champions League final it would something else of course. Lots of cameras, replays of crucial points in the game, experts on all strategy commenting moves (bringing in people from tha army and the air force commenting the game in Battlefield 2 would be cool), live cameras on the gamers gaces as they play, lots of on-screen statistics presented in a readable way. All the data on the gamers screens are made to be watched quite closely to the screen. People are not sitting that close to the tv so it needs to be bigger to be readable for television.

Game servers for broadcasters
3) Special servers. I think the developers of the games will start making special server software just for the tv broadcasts. When NBC airs the world finals in Project Gotham Racing 3, they would like to have access to all views and cameras in the game in their control room. All. So the tv producer can produce this like any normal Indy 500 or Formula 1 race.

Same with Battlefield 2: Several times during the game they missed important things because the guys in the studio happened to be on another camera when it happened. And they didn’t have replays. With special server software for tv companies, they could replay any event in the game, from any angle, not missing a thing.

As for now, this is quite geeky stuff. But still so mainstream that the website of Norwegian Broadcasting almost chrashed during the web-tv transmission. Over 15 000 streams were sent out, and 6 000 unique users were watching it live, making it the most popular live webcast in Norway ever. Even NIX (Norwegian Internet Exchange), the hub of all net traffic in Norway, had problems because of this. See the graph and read about it at NRK.no o (in Norwgian).

(picture by NRK)

The final is still available in NRK’s web-tv here (Windows Media streaming). So have a look and see what you think. How long do you think it takes before a major US or European airs a game live in primetime? My guess, within two years or before.

Related: The best gamers in the world channel

This is the same thing that made Bjørn Dæhlie the worlds greatest winter athlete. He used to go the fastest he could as a junior. As fast as possible: 110%. For 3 out of 15 kms. Then fall over. Exhausted. And become number 39 or something.

Next race: As fast as possible for 4 kms. Fall over. Exhausted.

See the pattern?

When he finally managed to finish a race without falling over, he started winning. And winning. And became the most winning winter-athlete in the Olympics ever.

The moral: Don’t play it safe and save for later. Just give it everything you have from the start. This won’t give you golds in the beginning, but sooner or later it will.

Update

Leon at Lifehack.org has posted about this, and invited you to discuss it. One reader already strongly disagrees.

Two weeks are like a year when you’re 8.

The day when we got the shirts/shorts was like christmas eve. We put in the shirts veeery fast, went outdoors and played football for hours.

Some years later the shirt was small, and about to be retired. The shorts were still ok. Magnificent quality.

My father was a fisherman. He worked from 5 or 6 in the mornings until after we had got to bed in the evenings. Taking his boat to the dangerous seas outside Northern Norway to catch fish, and bring it to the harbour.

So my mother took care of the house, and did most of the housework. Until the day when my father found out the some modern behaviour were to be introduced in our house. HE was going to wash our clothes.

If I knew what would happen, I would have taken the fuzes in our house. And thrown them into the sea.

My father filled up the washing machine: His navy blue working clothes used when fishing, my brother’s and my sweaters, my mother’s underwear, bedwear and the Liverpool shirts and shorts. And the red socks.

Then lots of washing detergent (lots of!), and the temperature on 90 degrees Celcius (194 Fahrenheit).

After that our Liverpool shirts were more like Aston Villa shirts. And two numbers smaller. No offense, Villa fans, but where I lived, in the 70s, Aston Villa didn’t cut it.

Tonight is the Champions league finals in Istanbul. Liverpool will beat Milan. And even if I don’t care so much about football as I did in the 70s, when Kevin Keegan was as our hero, it will be fun watching Liverpool win something important for the first time in years. Go, Riise!

Technorati tag: football / soccer / championsleague / liverpool

” – What kind of board and equipment does Mikkel use?”

” – Different stuff. Right now he’s using a Burton Uninc board. Also Burton hardware, and Analog software. Googles from Anon and Red safety equipment – helmet and backplate. His skating equipment is from DVS and Session Skateboardshop. Fashion stuff from Aloha Hemp.”

Says Mikkel’s father Per Øivind Bang.

The blogs are in Norwegian, but the there are lots of videos and pictures. And a guest book where the young athletes are answering questions, like this one for Mikkel.

Download X Games on iTunes

What if it was MUCH more advanced?

I love my Xbox. Once in a while I hurdle through the streets of Sydney, Chicago, Stockholm, Edinburgh and Moscow in the game Project Gotham Racing 2, beautifully rendered in 3D, with stereo and superb surround sound. Great fun.

Now, all these cities have marathons too: Sydney, Chicago, Stockholm, Edinburgh and Moscow.

Wouldn’t it be great if I could run the same beautiful tracks from PGR2, as I drive on my Xbox?

Combine treadmills with game consoles

Here is how it could work: I sign up for an Xbox live account. And some kind of Technogym (or other manufacturer of training machines) account. When I’m at the gym (or even at home), I use a digital ID to log on. It could be a small wireless keychain or an USB dongle.

When stepping on to the treadmill, my favourite tracks/cities/landscapes (set up on my Xbox or computer at home in advance) pop up on a LCD screen in front of me. It could be a city like in PGR2, or landscapes, which I think most people would prefer. I could run the French Alpes one day, and the treadmill would raise the angle with the terrain. And play the sounds of the landscape; small rivers, birds singing, wind in my hair. Oh, it’s almost as being there. Almost.

Since all machines are online, I could also run with other people at the same track, in real time. I could put on headset (if I’m not too tired too talk) and talk to other runners in other locations all over the world. I could beat Joi in quick run through Ginza. Or race Jason through Central Park. Easy!

My Polar pulse belt would of course send its data to the machines in the gym, and I would be able to see it all on theTechnogym or S.A.T.S. site from home. And see my progress.

Beat Lance Armstrong (with some cheating)

When bicycling at the gym, I could also choose where to go. And I could participate live with real bicyclists. Like the Tour de France and the Giro d´Italia. If the real cyclists wore GPS units in the race (like the rally cars in WRC does, we could race them from our gyms (and the tv-viewers would get lots better statistics on screen). The real cyclists would of course beat the crap out of me. So I get an x1.5 (or rather x10) to my speed. I can bicycle in realtime when the race is on, or later when the riders are in.

Through a venture with other software makers, Technogym could release a software package where I can create my own tracks. And even upload them on the net. I can map the woods next to my house, and use GPS data to get heights and directions. Good tracks are presented on the website. People could vote for best tracks.

Or the gym could match customer data with GPS positions of tracks to give them tracks where they live. Or even make their own tracks and sell them to customers. “Buy London Marathon track, with the new museums added, only Euro 5.99″. Or “Run Central park at night. Gates included! Only US$ 9.99″.

Or places one never could run in the real life. Like the great chinese wall. Or imaginary places: Run through the castle of Hogwarts in Harry Potter. Or the upper decks of Titanic. Or the fields outside Minas Tirith in of The Lord of the rings, running through hords of orcs and other brutal beings (the nice thing is that the software make them jump away with a scared impression when you approach them!) Or flying, so that your running or bicycling translates to engine power in a small plane or some kind of manpowered flying device.

Since all machines are networked, and my digital ID tracks what I’m doing, the gym gets a very good overview of my progress. It tracks how much I have run, how much I have bicycled, lifted, pulled etc. My personal trainer can pinpoint exactly where I need to change something.

Add your favourite tunes…

Maybe I could subscribe to music streams on the machines too. So when I connect on a machine, I get streams of music according to my taste? Maybe my Last.fm stations I already bring my iPod but new music is always nice.

A bicycle or treadmill with an online Xbox system would certainly make training at home lots more fun. Just a plain version where a nice landscape follows the speed on the treadmill or the bicycle would make things much more inspiring. And the fact that I would know where I “left off” last time; “that small house near the river”, and could start off there next time.

I predict that the next big thing in training with machines is online connections. This is good for statistics, I know my progress and I can’t cheat. And it’s pure entertainment: It’s so much more fun running on Venice beach than in my dark basement with the wind howling outside.

All this would of course be connected to some kind of mail and SMS system. So I get reminders on mail or mobile when it’s time to run/lift/cycle/row again. I could make competitions with my friends. The first one to make a 10% progress in weigths. Or run a marathon. Or cycle Paris-Nice. Or increase oxygen intake or whatever. If you add online weights with the same digital IDs, people could weigh themselves at the gym (if weight loss was the issue) and have the results stored online.

Sony/Microsoft and the game producers could sell advertising along the tracks. When running the London marathon on the treadmill, I pass shops and signs with products of my taste. I just tap the panel in front of me to get the offers mailed to me back home.

Make a standard – the new “MIDI” for exercise maschines

I’m always frustrated with the lack of open standards in the computer world. So to keep up competition, we make a standard for the data that the training machines collect when we train.

I call it EMIL – Exercise Machine Interchange Language.

It sounds like “e mill” (electronic mill) when you say it. And it’s my little homage to Astrid Lindgren’s wonderful character Emil.

It defines what kind of training I’m doing (weight loss, muscles etc.), what kind of the body the exercise is for (lifting weights trains the biceps etc.), how many repetitions or how far (12,4 kms on the bicycle), and with what “weigth” (which gear on the bicycle, how many kilos lifted etc). It’s like MIDI for exercise. This way, different producers of training equipment could hook up to the same standard, and people could move their data with them. Software makers could make software that reads the data from the digital IDs or the websites, so people could use their data at home, analyze them, publish them. Companies that make “sporty” mobile phones like the Nokia 5140 and the Siemens M65 – and Garmin that make a special GPS for training – could use the same standard, so that all your training is stored in one single place. The product would be labeled “EMIL enabled”.

The same could be done everywhere else people train and exercise: Squash halls (the unit stores the number of minutes you played, and heart rate if you used a heart rate monitor/belt), ski slopes (measures how many times you did the slope etc.) and swimming (how many meters etc.).

Use the comments section to improve on the idea!

Update
I’ve posted a little update, looking at Brian Eno and StepUI from Microsoft.

Update 2
Technogym has now a system to keep track of your training progress. Read about it here.