photo credit: John Carleton

I started running back in mid-November of last year. It wasn’t my idea initially and I had my reservations about starting up because we were heading into cold, wet, wintry season.

We started the Learn to Run clinic through the local Running Room store. The weather, true to prediction, was crappy. We ran in the wind, rain and in some cases the snow, 3, sometimes 4 times a week. We finished the Learn to Run clinic, and then made the jump to the 10K clinic. And finally, almost 4 months to the day we started to run, we finished running our first 10K distance…followed by completing the Sun Run 10K run with 51,000 other people last Sunday.

What really struck me about running as a sport is that there’s a lot of time and money invested in the technology; in the running shoes, the clothing, the post-workout drinks and of course in the gadgets runners use to keep track of their runs.

It didn’t take me too long to get interested in the gadgetry specifically; that’s the kind of stuff I am really interested in. Looking at the various GPS watches and Nike doodads, all of it seems really cool, but seeing as how I have an iPhone that I take with me for playing music while I run, I figured, there had to be some kind of running app that would work with my playlists.

After trying a few apps, I settled on RunKeeper. RunKeeper is fantastic. It has all the features I’ve been looking for in an app…it allows me to:

1. associate any of my playlists to the run (aka activity)
2. set up the workout duration if I want to do interval runs or not
3. review after the run the pace I ran, by the minute
4. view the route I ran plotted against Google maps
5. call out, if I want, the average pace by kilometre or mile
6. report the number of calories burned

For $9.99 for the Pro version gives you the above features and if you also sign up for a user account with RunKeeper you can also view your completed activities over time. RunKeeper is a fantastic investment if you’re looking to utilize your iPhone or Android-powered phone and you don’t want to plunk down the extra cash for a dedicated running watch or workout-tracking device.

So are we still going to continue running? We sure are, but we’re just not sure if we want to go and make the jump to the half-marathon or the duathalon/triathalon route. We’ll see

In the year and a bit that I’ve had my iPhone it’s become pretty indispensible for me. I don’t need to use an alarm clock anymore, Clock does it for me. I don’t need to check my e-mail on a computer anymore, Mail does it for me. Maps acts as a great backup GPS device if my Magellan GPS unit doesn’t cut it (or if I forgot it at home)

Alongside the standard iPhone apps I’ve been trying out a bunch of apps from the Apps Store. I’m a “if I don’t get it in 5 or 10 minutes I’m getting rid of it” type of app user. So if something passes muster, and has stayed on the iPhone for a couple of months, it gets my stamp of approval.

Here’s a couple that are on my favorites list at the moment…this is part 1 of 2, the second part will be coming next week…

CardStar – Tired of carrying all your discount or membership cards? CardStar allows you to enter your membership card information from airlines, retailers, libraries and other businesses and where it can, creates bar codes so it can be scanned through, all through one app.

Echofon – Formerly Twitterfon, this is a Twitter client application. I like it because it does exactly what I need it to do and nothing more…view tweets, posts tweets, shortens URL links and block or follow users.

Flixster – What’s new or coming soon in the theatres, or on DVD this week? Want to know what the movie times are at your preferred theatre? What’s Rottentomatoes.com say about the movie? Want to review a movie and share it with friends on Facebook, Flixster or Netflix and vice versa? It’s all integrated into the app.

Flashlight – Need to find your way up to the cabin in the middle of nowhere? Need to get under the office desk to plug in a cord? Flashlight does it and allows you to pick colors and brightness. Again, it’s not fancy but it does exactly what I want it to do.

Scoremobile – Need to find out what the score is for your favorite team? Scoremobile provides that and live blog posts as games occur.