The Best Things about being a Runner

A few months ago, the Inside Nike Running blog posted their Top 10 Best Things About Being A Runner. I filed away the link for a time when I wanted to talk about the Nike+iPod system again. Well, today my brother challenged me through the Nike running community to see which one of us can log the most miles in 30 days. See, Nike built their system to not only keep track of user statistics but to draw visitors in to the community of runners at large. One of the ways they try to do that is with their Challenge mechanism.

I've been pretty happy with my consistency in running over the past few months. Earlier this year I increased the frequency of my runs from twice a week to three times, and that has had a positive impact on how fit I feel and how far I can run. Little does my brother know that I was just looking for a reason to increase again to four times a week. You're going DOWN bro!

So, with that brief fitness update, here are the Top 10 Best Things About Being A Runner from Nike:

10 - Developing washboard abs, so you can do your laundry on your stomach and save a lot of money. I’m not there yet but I can imagine it’s going to be really convenient.

9 - Being confident that you could race your friends around the block and win. (This really only applies to eight year olds reading this article. I don’t think adults really race each other around the block anymore, which is unfortunate.)

8 - So you can wear running shorts everywhere, and be the guy that wears running shorts everywhere.

7 - So if another animal of similar speed chases you, you can outrun it. Like maybe a goose…? I actually don’t really know how fast geese are. I guess if the goose was smart enough it would start flying, then you’d probably be in trouble. Have you ever been chased by a goose? It’s terrifying.

6 - The rockstar lifestyle.

5 - Paying 30 dollars for a local road race, then having to swerve in and out of a bunch of six year olds, baby-strollers, and people in chicken suits for the first mile.

4 - When all of your clothes stop fitting and you have to buy a whole new wardrobe…Or at least new clothes to put in your wardrobe. Who has a wardrobe these days? I don’t know that I’ve ever even seen a wardrobe in person. It does sound better than “buying a whole new closet” though. That sounds like you’re replacing the actual closet. Which is sort of pointless. Unless there’s structural damage to the closet, I guess…

3 – So that smokers can become even more annoying. Sorry, smokers…but you’re really annoying. Just kidding. Kind of.

2 – So that you can go to your ten year high school reunion and no one even recognizes you because you look so thin! And so bald.

1 – Nike+.

Do you use the Nike+ system? If so, challenge me!

Join the Conversation (Part 1) - What is Going On?

A few weeks ago, I was talking with a good friend about the difficulty of keeping track of people like me who switch to a different thing every week to publish pieces of their lives. With all of the social web services available today, you would think it would be easier to keep track of your friends and what they are doing. Instead, the gap between early adopters of web technologies and the average Internet user continues to grow, looking more like the difference between upper and middle class America.

I posted before about setting something up to alleviate the problem. I used Tumblr to aggregate everything I was doing online at the time. Tumblr was the first service I knew of that made that kind of aggregation easy, but the whole point of a tumblelog is to post little bits of information independently as you tumble across them. I began to see how others were using it to share entertaining and interesting content without spending time to explain every last detail in a lengthy blog post.

Around that same time, I started using Twitter, and again, I began using it in a very simple way. Eventually, I saw what was happening in the community around that service. A conversation was going on that I was able to listen to and participate in, and I have been hooked ever since. Twitter is micro-blogging... informally sharing little bits of information about what is going on as it happens to you or around you. The best analogy I have heard is that Twitter is like the water cooler for the Internet... people just congregate and talk about whatever is going on. Sometimes the conversations are meaningful; sometimes they are inane; but they are always relevant since you can choose who you listen to, unlike an actual water cooler!

Fast forward back to the present. I heard about a new way Internet people were carrying on the conversation, so I signed up and got my invite to Seesmic a couple weeks ago. Seesmic is still a very new (alpha) video sharing site. While you are probably familiar with watching user-generated video on the web via YouTube and other sites like it, Seesmic is a different take on video. While keeping up with the conversation today, I found this reference to be an accurate description:

And don’t mistake Seesmic for another YouTube. Seesmic is to YouTube what Twitter is to blogging.

So now you know what is going on. There is a conversation happening 24 hours a day that you are welcome to listen in on or participate in. The conversation can be as small/intimate or as large/open as you want it to be. Next up in the series... trying to keep up.