It’s not enough to run …

But I have to tell people about it. My reason is because if I slack off, I want people to call me on it! And it makes me want to run just so I can have something to log.

I’ve been tracking my runs at Map My Run for about a year now. They have an iPhone app I used to use before I got my Garmin. It was great, except my battery died usually after about 6 miles. The GPS doesn’t work quite as well as the Garmin, either. It told me my very first run was in Lake Mary, Florida, even though it was in Charlotte. Got the street names right, too! Still thinks my top run is in Lake Mary, and I’ve never run there in my life (though I did visit there shortly before using the app for the first time.) The site is not user-friendly at all – very busy and hard to find what you want. But I love the gear tracker (how many other people can say with certainty: “I’ve put 176.85 miles on my shoes so far”?) and I love the iPhone app. I don’t use it for my outside runs anymore, but I do use it to record my treadmill data when running inside – much easier than trying to remember it later! I also like how it sorta automatically updates from the Garmin site. Speaking of …

When I got my Garmin watch I started using the Garmin connect site to upload the workouts. Here’s one of them – my 10-miler from last weekend. This, hands-down, is the best look at the individual workout. But it doesn’t give me a whole lot of other information – how my gear is doing, what my friends are doing (you have to really try to find someone else’s workouts), etc. Plus I can’t add any non-GPS watch workouts. No treadmill runs, no weight training, etc. I need something more comprehensive.

This week I signed up for Daily Mile to see how that goes. Within a few hours of signing up, I made a new friend – someone who lives in town who is also running Thunder Road. Nice! I added my workouts in this morning from the past month – and they do have a gear tracker! Somehow it is saying I’ve put 181 miles on my shoes, so I’m not sure what happened there (probably user error.) I like how user-friendly it is. I like how it seems to have all the same information that Map My Run has, but in a much cleaner format. I actually enjoy spending time on the web site, unlike MMR. No iPhone app, though, and no way to automatically update from Garmin.

Will I keep using all 3 sites? I’m guessing that would take way too much time, so at some point I’ll choose between Daily Mile and Map My Run. Will keep using Garmin of course, as that’s the only way to get the workouts off of my watch! Which sites do you use to track workouts? What about food?

In other running news …

I found a great series of workouts on Time Warner’s Exercise on Demand channel. They are all designed for runners and walkers, to keep us from getting hurt. I did the cool down workout after my run yesterday and really enjoyed it. There’s also a warmup workout, a weights workout, and an abs and back workout. Check it out if you have Time Warner!