DW Runners

I am a bad person, because this short video compilation of treadmill wrecks made me laugh out loud. In my defense, most of the people (and cats and dogs) have only themselves to blame.

( Embed under the cut )

If you're not into the embed thing, you can see it at http://now.msn.com/living/0327-ultimate-treadmill-fails.aspx

I've been using a Garmin 305 for years, and I really like it, except it takes so long to find satellites. At home it's not too bad--if I turn it on while I get dressed it's ready to go by the time I am--but there have been times when I've been traveling that it's been really inconvenient. One one trip to New York it never did pick up satellites, even after two hour-long runs. And of course it doesn't display the heart rate while it's locating satellites, so it's really useless until it's got them.

So when I was in California in February I thought, I'm going to be carrying my iPhone anyway, why not use its GPS instead of the Garmin's? I downloaded an app, and it worked great. When I got home I looked into ways of turning the iPhone into a heart rate monitor, too, and it turns out you can buy an adapter that lets an iPhone read a Garmin strap or a Bluetooth strap. The Wahoo version works with various apps; apparently DigiFit makes one as well that only works with DigiFit apps. I went with the Wahoo Fitness dongle.

Since then I've been trying out a bunch of the apps that work with the HR monitor. Mostly I've been happy with them. The Garmin is better in a lot of ways, but I like the voice feedback a lot--with some of these apps I hardly look at the display because I get regular status updates.

On to the reviews, which only cover the free version of these apps. Most of them have paid versions with more features. And I bet there are Android versions of most of these, but I have no idea how they'd work.

( Nike+ GPS )

( RunKeeper )

( iMapMyRun )

( Endomondo )

( Runtastic )

( 321Run )

( Wahoo Fitness )

( iRunner )

( Conclusions )