My wife is a running coach. Because I get her services for free, I thought I’d give something back by creating something that might make her job a little easier for her work with paying clients. One of the tools she uses is as useful to her as it is cumbersome to handle. It’s a collection of running data that begins with men’s world record times at the following distances:

• 2 miles
• 5 kilometers
• 5 miles
• 10 kilometers
• 15 kilometers
• 10 miles
• 20 kilometers
• Half marathon (13.1 miles)
• 25 kilometers
• 30 kilometers
• Marathon (26.2 miles)

With this data forming one column in a spreadsheet (along with a corresponding mile pace and 400m split for each pace), she has 49 more columns of data for other times for each distance, beginning with the world record and each column decreasing in speed by 2%. Here’s a snapshot of the raw data she takes with her to the track, which continues across several pages:

She uses this data to train runners for a variety of different time goals for a variety of distances. Based on a given distance and time (such as a race or time trial a runner has already completed), she looks down the appropriate column for an appropriate time goal and corresponding pace for a different distance. For example, if a runner has completed a 10k in 30:04, a good 10-mile goal is 50:02, which translates into a (very fast) 5:00 mile pace and 1:15 400m splits (a quarter mile, or one lap around the track).

Of course, stretched across a number of pages, you can see how difficult this can be to use (especially in the rain!). Wouldn’t it be great if she could have an app on her Android phone that would take the given input and give her the appropriate pacing data for a specified distance? And while we’re at it, why not include the 1200m, 1000m, 800m, and 200m splits as well?

I’ve been fooling around with Google’s Android App Inventor and thought I could handle this on my own, but when it became obvious that I was in over my head, I consulted Paul Barry, the author of O’Reilly Media’s forthcoming (soon!) Head First Python, to see if he had any tips (he’d been working on other Android examples for the book at the time).

As it turns out, he was looking for a sufficiently complicated project for the last chapter of the book, so this request provided a particularly juicy challenge for him. In the end, he got a great chapter to end the book, and I got an app for my wife and her coaching friends to use, so everybody wins (especially the Python learners who buy the book). Here’s a quick demo of the new Android app in action:

It’s just about ready for primetime, and I’m also planning to release it as a web app soon, for those who are unfortunate enough to not have an Android phone. Stay tuned to the new Split Hitter website for the official release, and follow me on Twitter for the announcement and updates.

For tools, I’ll be using only my Android phone and free apps that are readily available in the Android Market (all of which are also covered in my forthcoming book).

First, and most obviously, I’ll be tweeting from the road. My Twitter app of choice is Twidroid, with the additional google maps 4 twidroid plug-in to add my current location into each tweet and allow all fans to pinpoint our team’s progress on the course:

This app combination uses my phone’s built-in GPS to insert a Google Maps link to my precise location:

Anyone following along from home can click the link in my Twitter stream to go straight to the map:

So, that’s how you’ll know where I am, but I know you’ll still miss my smiling (hopefully) face and still want to hear from me about what and how I’m doing. So, I’m going to try to stream live video from the race course using Qik. It’s pretty easy to use. Just launch the app, go online, and start recording. The video feed will start streaming to my personal Qik page, and I can configure my settings to post an update to Twitter when I go live. Here’s what it will look like on my phone:

And here’s what it will look like on the web, all nicely geotagged and everything:

But I won’t be just a talking head. You can participate too. See that “Share your thoughts…” box in the previous screen? Whatever you type there will show up on my phone screen, allowing me to “take calls” during the show. Finally, if some episodes are good enough to save or publish for posterity, I’ll tweet its archived URL or embed it on my Facebook wall:

For other media (audio, photos, or video I don’t intend to stream live), I’ll use Pixelpipe (okay, the free version gets you photos only, but the Pro version is only a dollar):

I’ll send media to my blog, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, or whatever, so keep an eye on all outlets of my online media empire for minute-by-minute updates (for as long as my stamina holds out).

Exactly two weeks ago today, I started a new training videoblog. Beyond moving all running-specific chatter away from my main personal site here, I had another specific purpose in mind, which I didn’t reveal at the time because my plan required acceptance of an application I’d filed on that same day. I received that acceptance today, and I’m excited to share the news with my followers here, in the hopes that you’ll also follow and support me over there.

First, a little background. Training for and running the San Francisco Marathon this year was incredibly important and rewarding for me, and the experience made me want to use a similar opportunity to do something even more important for others. I want to take on a challenge much bigger than anything I could accomplish solely for myself.

As you may also know, Kristina has participated in the Dana-Farber Marathon Challenge twice, and each time she inspired me by her commitment, passion, and success. Her athletic accomplishments inspired me to run San Francisco, and now that she’s not applying for DMFC herself this year, her charitable achievements have inspired me to carry the torch that she started. I have been truly moved by her work for DFMC, which has highlighted the research her contributions have funded. It’s an effort I want to be a part of myself.

So, I was thrilled and honored to be selected among many applicants to run the Boston Marathon in April to raise money for the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. Though I must raise at least $3,250 to support research that will help eradicate cancer, my personal goal will be significantly more ambitious.

The DFMC raises funds for the Claudia Adams Barr Program in Innovative Basic Cancer Research at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. The DFMC directs 100% of funds raised to the Barr Program, which enables gifted young scientists at the leading edge of discovery to achieve better cure rates and to enhance patients’ quality of life.

I hope you will support my challenge by giving a gift to my run and, in doing so, help bring an end to the challenge of cancer. I haven’t been assigned a donations page yet, but I’ll post it to my sidebar and my About page as soon as I have it. Please consider following me there, as my training blog also begins to document my fundraising efforts for this cause that’s so much bigger than my own humble performance. Thanks in advance for any donation you’re able to make, and I look forward to seeing you around there soon (or, actually, you seeing me around there, I suppose). I truly appreciate your support.

Now that the whole thing is up, here’s a roundup of all the pieces:

• Scratching My Seven-Year Itch
• San Francisco Marathon Dramedy, Act I
• San Francisco Marathon Dramedy, Act II
• San Francisco Marathon Dramedy, Act III
• San Francisco Marathon Dramedy, Act IV

Thanks again to everyone who supported me throughout my training, followed me during the race, and left such thoughtful comments for me on Twitter, Facebook, email, etc. I really appreciated it and know that all many of you wanted in return was to actually hear how it went. So, these posts are for you (you know who you are).

I don’t feel the need to analyze this swing too much (and I hope nobody else does either), but I can say that I know of three significant reasons for my change of heart:

1. Running has become much more important to me than I thought it would. I got back into running to get in shape, lose a few pounds, and generally look and feel better about myself. Since accomplishing those objectives, I’ve found how helpful the practice is for mental clarity and focus. That is to say, I no longer see running as a means to an end. It’s become an end in itself for me.
2. Someone close to me has served as a constant source of inspiration. It’s hard to watch, support, and feel constant awe and amazement for someone so passionate and talented about something you yourself do for more utilitarian reasons and not get swept up in the excitement and feel the need to take your own practice to the next level.
3. I simply have felt the need, for a while now, for a big hairy audacious goal. I want to do something significant, for myself. I want to chart a course for a distant destination and reach it. I want to see just how far these legs and this heart can take me.

I’d kept this idea to myself for a while, largely because of my previous public stance on the subject, but I eventually let it slip that I was considering training for the BayState Marathon in the fall. I wanted to run a marathon, but I didn’t want to make a big deal of it (financially) by choosing a “destination race” (Lowell is the closest possible location for a marathon for me).

But then I learned that the San Francisco Marathon was scheduled for July 26. And I’ll be at a professional conference in San Jose on July 24. All I needed to do is stay an extra couple nights (one extra night, really, because I probably wouldn’t take the redeye on the 24th) and I could scoot up the coast to see the city by the bay and run across the Golden Gate Bridge. Twice. I registered on Monday.

Here’s a map of the course (view large):

But enough of all this apologia, which was necessary to defend myself against possible critique but which isn’t really the point of this post. I really want to talk about my need for a good, geeky piece of training technology to help me reach my goal.

There’s already one Garmin Forerunner 405 in our household, which I desire but which is pretty much always spoken for by its rightful owner. I figured I could get a more economical pedometer or spend somewhere in the range of $160-$200 for an earlier model Garmin, but I did just get a pretty extravagant birthday present, which makes investing in another expensive gadget hard to justify.

But then I saw a way of actually leveraging my pricey new gadget with a free application that could give me everything I need: Google’s My Tracks. The appeal of my phone actually serving as my GPS training partner was too good not to investigate, so I downloaded the application and gave it a spin. I wasn’t disappointed.

As mentioned on the Official Google Blog, My Tracks was developed as a “20% project” with the following features :

• Record and visualize GPS tracks while running, hiking, biking, skiing — or any other outdoor activity
• Get live statistics, such as total/moving time, (average) speed, distance, and elevation profile
• Send performance statistics to Google Docs to build a training history
• Mark places and describe activities for others to discover via Google Maps

I took it for a spin this morning and found it intuitive and incredibly easy to use. Here’s the information screen and the elevation profile for my run:

Just about all I’m missing in the stats are my mile splits, which I think I could actually get but haven’t figured out how to do so easily (i.e., without marking each mile manually while I’m running). And the elevation information will be particularly helpful for my training, as I’m actually seeking out hills (without much trouble) to help train for this particular race, which has never been accused of being a flat course.

All this information is great on the phone, but with a few quick touches on the screen, it becomes much more useful as a record. When I was done running, I just selected the option to send the map that was created on my run to Google’s My Maps, and the route went away to look like this:

You can even click on the route to get the specific stats for the particular run:

And the same click sends this information to a spreadsheet in Google Docs, recording everything you’d want to track in a training program:

Future runs will feed right into this document, perfect for keeping an eye on my improved speed (that’s the idea, at least) and cumulative mileage.

So, I think I’ve found my geeky running companion for this training round. It’s certainly by no means a watch (carrying it and pressing the touchscreen with my sweaty fingers will be cons I’ll have to deal with), but it will get the job done with a gadget I already own, which makes me feel better about the price of that gadget and happy to not have to invest in another.

If it looks familiar, that’s because it’s awfully similar to a post I wrote in January. Yes, that’s me in the picture, and even the links are mine (to my Twitter stream and my MapMyRun.com profile).

Now, this isn’t the first time I’ve had my content plagiarized (though this stung a little more both because it was pretty personal and because I’m actually trying to parlay a version of the content into a different venue), so I wouldn’t even comment on it if it weren’t for the bizarre differences I noticed after my first glance. Take a closer look at that first screenshot, and then look at this one:

If you’re going to plagiarize me (and unless you’re actually trying to pass off my content as your own, there’s really no need, given my liberal Creative Commons license, which basically just asks for attribution and noncommerical use), at least use my own words! I know I’ve never begun a sentence with the phrase “mouth of need.”

Typically, when I’ve seen content from my blog appear elsewhere on the Web, it’s usually been the result of simple cut and paste or some kind of bot, just scraping the content and running with it, but what’s going on here? It’s like my post was run through a translator into another language and then converted back into English. Or something.

But the look of pain in an image is universal and doesn’t require translation:

Now, if I were to see my own likeness warped in the same way in which my words were garbled, well, goodly, most of the fashion, that would be a different narrative.

Speaking of motivation, like (I assume) most people who fall off the exercise wagon and want to jump back on, I felt I needed this little push to get over the initial hump, where even a couple miles on the road or treadmill felt a little demoralizing. I also held a bit of my motivation in reserve (that is, I didn’t make it public), something I’d counted on before–namely, training for a race. More specifically, I decided I’d prepare myself to run the Hyannis Half Marathon in February, which I ran last year as one leg of a two-person full-Nmarathon relay. When I started in November, this was the prize on which I set my eyes, the thing I told myself I’d better be ready for to keep myself moving.

But somewhere along the way–and it didn’t take all that long, really–I actually started to enjoy running again for its own sake again. This isn’t to say that the goal was no longer important (to tell the truth, I started to get more impatient about getting to that distance), but I became less dependent on the ideal of participating in the official event. So, after running my longest distance (8.3 miles on December 21) since last February and feeling really good about it, I decided to push myself a week later to see what I was capable of.

The result? Half-marathon distance, on December 28, on my own, in 1:49:55, about five minutes faster than my time last February in the relay. Though proud of me, my running (and life) partner, Kristina, was probably right to call this jump in distance “stupid,” but I didn’t injure myself and felt great after, so I’m glad I did it. I feel like I’ve already accomplished what I set out to do, and now I’m ready to maintain my health and enjoy what I’m doing, without calling it “training.”

But I don’t want anyone to misunderstand my perspective on formal races, least of all Kristina, who does train and does run races, all of which makes me more than a little awestruck. I still think races are great events and very important for reaching major goals, and, to be honest, I’m probably rationalizing not running Hyannis a little more than making a big statement, largely because it’s a financial expense I feel I can (and should) avoid. But there is a nugget of truth in there, at least for me. For the distances I intend to run and for my own goals, I don’t think I need a race to get me there.

Now, if I were to run a marathon, that would be a different story, something I don’t think I could ever accomplish on my own. I actually ran a marathon with Kristina once (well, most of the way, before I allowed her to leave me behind a few miles from the finish) and it nearly made me physically unable to run ever again (my knees! my knees!). And as you can see in the photo on the left, I did not feel great at the finish. As it turns out, thankfully, it didn’t end up killing my ability to run permanently, but it just may have killed my desire to run 26.2 miles in one stretch ever again. I’ll leave that to Kristina (her next marathon is less than two weeks away) and support her every step of the way (though not literally, of course).

Anyway, I’ve been running as much as I can since late November and clocked over 75 miles in December, which I’m hoping will keep anyone from calling this a “New Year’s resolution.” I’ve already run 21 miles in the first five days of 2009, which is just over the modest 20-mile goal I’ve set myself as my minimum weekly distance (there, I’ve said it out loud, so I suppose I’ll need to follow through), and I continue to feel great. I don’t get the crowds, but I get a finish line every day, and every day, I get to break the tape.

If you’re interested, my running partner has a more complete (and more interesting) report of the event here. I ran my leg in large part as a way to help support her training for the Boston Marathon. Her leg was just another step in something much larger, running twice as far and raising money to support Dana-Farber cancer research. If you’d like to help support her, you don’t need to run 13.1 miles. A donation would be appreciated even more.

As a humorous aside for all of the editors, word wonks, and other sticklers in the audience (actually, you don’t need to fall into any of those categories to appreciate this), Kristina also pointed out a pretty significant typo (I was too tired to catch the obvious, which should tell you something about endurance level) in the four medals our team of two received: 

How far is a “narathon” anyway?

Since then, I haven’t been much of a runner, first because I was physically incapable and then because life and habit crept in and a touch of laziness conspired to keep me fairly sedentary. Kristina, on the other hand, after a hiatus, took her first marathon (she ran with me, most of the way, before pulling ahead for the last few miles) as a challenge to do more. Her efforts, both raising money for charity and for her own self-discipline and single-minded devotion to accomplishing something important within in her and around her have truly inspired me.

Recently, though, I decided to stop simply being jealous of her drive, fitness, and accomplishments, and allowed her to rope me into being the second half of her marathon relay team in February. I’ve only been running in earnest for a few weeks, and only legitimately “in training” for the last week or so, but already I feel worlds better for being a part of something like this again. Running is something the two of us can share again, even if we rarely get a chance to actually run together, and getting in shape has done a lot for me, both physically and emotionally. Best of all, my knees have actually let me do it. I’m crossing my fingers that they continue to hold out.

Today, I’d planned to run 6 miles, which isn’t too shabby and would tie (I ran it last weekend too) my longest single run since the marathon in 2002. But she once again inspired me to push myself, by bringing to my attention a fellow running blogger’s challenge to run “8 on the 8th.” Today, I did my 8 miles (in 1:06), and it felt great. Here’s hoping everything continues to go smoothly as I step up the mileage leading up to the February race. Who knows? Perhaps these old knees will let me go another 26.2 some day.

This is the last time I’ll make this request, but there’s still time to make a donation to support her efforts for the Dana-Farber Marathon Challenge. Isn’t it worth a little more to run on an injured knee in a Nor’easter?

UPDATE: I’m toying with the idea of live blogging the marathon via my cell phone. If you’re interested in updates, follow me on Twitter.