Experiencing adidas miCoach: Analyzing Workout Details

There are lots of ways to analyze my workout performance after I sync the data to the web. The most basic one is the automatic system feedback that tells me my performance against what miCoach had prescribed for me.

There’s also the quick visual on my heart rate chart that shows how much my heart rate stayed within the workout colors intended.

I can also open the color zone boxes at the right of my heart rate chart to see actual time and stats spent within the color. According to this workout, I spent more than 4 minutes of the 21 min workout in green.

I can also overlay another statistic on top of my current stat view. I found it fascinating to overlay the pace data on top of the heart rate. Most of the time an increase in my pace means an increase to my heart rate. Sometimes I have to stop at street corners or pause for other reasons, but my heart rate isn’t that reactive so it might only fluctuate slightly.

And finally, there’s a checkbox on the bottom right corner of the chart called “Analysis Bounds”. When I turn that on, I can drag the boundaries around on the chart to focus in on the area of the workout I really care about. This workout had 5 minutes of warm up and 10 minutes of cool down. What I really cared about was the middle few minutes where I was going back and forth between the green and yellow zones. I dragged the bounds in to the beginning and end of that area and the summary stats at the top adjusts to reflect only the data within my boundaries. I actually hit 100% within that half a mile block!

That got me thinking whether I did just as well with some of my other workouts. I can click on the workout name and open the workout navigator and quickly jump to a previously completed workout and do this all over again. :)

Home Ownership

Today I became a home owner. This is my new kitchen. It's shiny. :-)

It's been something I've been thinking about for quite some time. It's amazing how much you learn doing something like this, that you would otherwise never have any clue about.

I do feel rather "aged" all of a sudden with this step, much more so than crossing into the land of the thirty-somethings. Now I can commiserate with other people who has a mortgage and worry about home improvements and renovations. Hmm... not quite sure that was necessarily a step in the right direction for feeling 30 as the new 20. 

Either way, this is a milestone. One that will carry with me for 30 years according to my contracts.

I couldn't have done it without "my team" though. Here I am in front of the Cambridge Registry of Deeds with my awesome attorney and agent. Banker's in AZ so he didn't make it into the photo sadly. But he was there in spirit.

The process took a few hours and I had keys in hand after. I went home, grabbed some cooking and cleaning supplies, and headed over to the new place.

My first meal in my new home - pork and leek dumplings in the shiny new kitchen.

Experiencing adidas miCoach: Catching Up on Missed Workouts

I’ve fallen woefully behind on my workout schedule.

In part the weather has only been so so, but mostly because I’m in the process of moving so there’s been no free time. I got as far as the fourth workout, which was completed 10 days ago. I’m supposed to complete workout #10 today. But let’s be realistic, I know I won’t get back to #5 until at least end of next week.
I could individually drag and drop the workouts to fix my schedule, but that would take a while to do for the remaining 29 workouts.

Luckily there’s an option to restore my plan schedule.

I select Restore Schedule from the drop down and it allows me to choose the date I want to restart the plan and which workout to restart it with. I’ll be conservative and aim for next weekend to get back to my workout #5.

I clicked OK and voila! the schedule has been restored and my schedule updates to show the new scheduling of workouts.

Let’s hope there’s some good weather happening in the greater Boston area here by then so I can get back on my schedule!

Experiencing adidas miCoach: Mapping the Workout

On a beautiful Saturday morning a week ago I decided to run near the Charles River. I like running near the river because there’s a wonderful breeze that comes off the river  balancing against the heat of the sun. I went to Manage > Routes and mapped out the route I took, which came to a little over 2 miles over the course of about half an hour.

I went back to my Dashboard and clicked into the Plan Tracker on workout #3 to go to the details of that workout.

From there I selected the Route view and opened up my Routes List to locate the route I had just drawn and saved.

It immediately applies the route I selected to my workout, as can be seen with the name of the route selected displaying next to the Route view icon in the upper right hand corner, and also loads the saved route into my current view.

I zoomed in to a particular segment on my path, and when I hovered over a point I had drawn it showed me the cumulative distance at that point. There are also automatic mile markers in a purple outlined balloon along the path as well for reference.

I can also hide the tool bar at the top of the map to gain more visible space on the map.

I ended up covering another half a mile after I completed workout #3 before getting home. I captured that as a free workout separately because I wanted to get credit for the additional half mile (hey, every little bit counts!).

I could have arrived back at home more closely to the end of the workout by just listening to the miCoach Pacer narration. For plan workouts it will narrate the percent completion at 25%, 50% and 75%, so I could have turned around and doubled back at the half way point. But I like my scenery to change, so I try not to do a straight double back if I can. Now that I have a sense of how far it is to the river, and how long it takes me to run that distance, I can plan to do other workouts that are around the same length using a similar route. I have a pretty good sense of how much I can deviate from that path now and still make it home in about the amount of time it takes to do the workout. I look forward to the next beautiful day so I can do this all over again!

Experiencing adidas miCoach: Working Out and Sharing Results

So my first workout was supposed to be redoing the Assessment Workout on Saturday – but the weather was frigid for outdoor running in Boston so it didn’t happen. I figured I couldn’t have deteriorated that much and my previous results were probably fine.

I created a public view of my latest Assessment Workout using the Share functionality, so you can see the full workout screen shot with the coach’s feedback too.

Armed with my existing assessment, I proceeded with doing the first plan workout that was scheduled for Monday morning.

I was still on east coast time, so woke up early enough to do a run before starting the day. I put on my heart rate monitor, clipped the stride sensor onto my shoe, and headed down to the hotel treadmill with my iPod and Pacer. I forgot that I had previously left Pacer on Mandarin, so was pleasantly surprised by a female Mandarin speaking coach welcoming me to miCoach. I did a short 7 min free workout first because I found in the past that the heart rate signal is best after I start sweating. After finishing that workout I started up workout #1 of my lose weight plan.

It was a fun workout actually, and wasn’t too long either so I had time to sync the data to my account before jumping in the shower. I remembered that I wanted to hear my coaching in English next time so I changed that on the web first.

Then I plugged Pacer into my computer via the USB cable and synced via the miCoach Manager.

When that was done I went back to my Dashboard to see that it updated with my latest data.

That’s when I noticed I had a new achievement!

Turns out I had reached my first 10,000 calories since I started using miCoach! That’s pretty sweet. :-)

Clicking on the big 10000 took me to my workout results that gave me this achievement.

I overlaid my pace info on top of the heart rate info before using the Share functionality to create the public page of workout #1, which also shows my notes and ratings too.

First workout done, and 32 more to go! According to the plan tracker at the bottom of my dashboard I’ve completed 3% of my plan. Feels good!

Experiencing adidas miCoach: Setting Up

As a designer on a project we don’t always get the luxury of actually experiencing the products we have worked countless hours, sweat blood and tears to help create. I am lucky enough to have the opportunity to use the product (and no, not just in testing) after all the hustle and bustle around launching a new phase. I figured it would provide an interesting perspective to  share my experiences actually using the adidas miCoach training platform for all to see, so here goes!

I’ll be traveling on Sunday, so I’m figuring I should set my plan up before I go. It’s almost summer, so it’s time to shed some of the winter layers and go for that lose weight plan. It says it’s about 9 weeks long, ~35 workouts, so if I start now I’ll be done just in time for 4th of July.

I set up the new plan and the calendar shows me what my schedule looks like for this plan.

The first run is an assessment workout, which will determine what my heart rate zones should be during the training. Although I’ve done one before, I think the last few weeks of cold and rain in Boston plus perhaps some adding on of winter layers probably contributed to my lack of fitness, so I’m going to do a new and fresh one to see if I’m still up to snuff.

Here’s hoping the weather holds tomorrow when this all starts. Stay tuned!

Life with miCoach

So I'm going to start writing some posts on the company blog. It's my attempt to ever so subtly re-establish my existence on the web. I'll be re-posting my posts here for good old archival reasons. I've had my computer kill itself twice within 6 months, so I don't trust stuff to stick around without multiple backup copies.