Track It All This Fall

The future is now with an abundance of runner-friendly wearable tech

It’s now the fall of 2014 which means, based on what I learned watching Back to the Future, the future is only a few months away. As amazing as it is that we’ll soon have hoverboards. More jawdropping is how some people still track their fitness with paper and pens. So, with the future just around the corner, it’s about time you upgraded your fitness tracking regimen.

The most obvious first step in becoming a cyborg is a solid gps watch. Most units these days will tell you pace, distance, your route and many give heart rate readings. Those have nearly become standard features, but some of the newest editions track much more, such as running cadence, cycling power and stride length. A few, like the Adidas MiCoach Smart Run, even run on Android operating systems, meaning if anyone was willing to do a bit of work under the hood they could put all the hardware to whatever use they’re interested in. Also, a lot of the data these watches track can be exported to reasonably accessible formats, meaning with a bit of Google magic, there are plenty of other websites online to upload and share it all across platforms. The Garmin Fenix 2 even tracks your elevation above sea level, for those high-altitude run commutes into work.

Improving gps watches is nice, but to truly take on the future we need to know about all the other wasted time between logging mileage, like sleeping and eating. For this we can turn to a few options.

There are smartphone apps that track your running and other daily movement. You can get some to track sleep or your diet and upload all the results to social media or online databases to compare with others, set goals and keep motivated. There are ups and downs to tracking with smartphones, such as the convenience of always being connected to the web, but some of these apps are also notorious battery killers. I used an app called Moves for awhile to track everywhere I walked and biked for a few months in hopes of slowly mapping Toronto with my own legs (and a smartphone). My intention was for it to go on longer, but the constant gps use drained my battery too quickly to be feasible. I also couldn’t track any runs because I don’t run with my phone, which isn’t a problem for everyone but definitely can be a turn-off to some.

There are some options for doing lots of this heavy lifting without lifting your phone. There are plenty of other wrist fitness trackers, such as the Polar Loop and Garmin Vivofit, that track all your movement throughout the day, your sleep schedule and accompanying apps to help develop and follow a food plan and track everything about what you eat. They also use accelerators to discern between different activities, such as walking on a f lat surface or going up stairs. Most even look pretty sleek and don’t scream to others on the street that you’re secretly harvesting your own data.

Google and Apple are also working on entire healthy lifestyle ecosystems where you could bring all these separate streams of information about your training and health together into a single place. These programs could, presumably, crunch the numbers and return results, since they probably don’t know enough about you already. There’s also Google Glass, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The future is nearly here and you don’t want to be left behind. By pairing all the fitness and health-tracking gadgets and apps out there, we can liberate ourselves from the worry of doing it ourselves. It will be almost as simple as an old-fashioned, physical training log.– SL