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First Day with the Nike Plus FuelBand!

First day with the Nike Plus FuelBand:
One of the first steps, after setting up your Nike Plus account online and downloading the app, is to set a daily goal (from the following options):
  • Normal Day--2,000 NikeFuel,
  • Active Day--3,000 NikeFuel
  • High-Energy Day--5,000 NikeFuel
Not really knowing how much fuel any given activity earns you I set mine to 3000 this morning before running down the street to meet the guide for the first City Running Tours run in Grant Park.

Right off the bat, seeing The Bean (apologies to Anish Kapoor, but that's just a better name than Cloud Gate) without a ton of people around it was already worth waking up early on my day off:But I'll share more about the City Running Tours once I finish the third one ("Tragic Events") this Wednesday.

Regarding the FuelBand... after running two 5K tours (and walking around for about an hour in between) I had more than exceeded my set goal of 3000 NikeFuel (more than doubling it). Syncing the FuelBand with the app resulted in brief congratulatory videos which was pretty cool. However, it also said that I went a lot more miles than seven (six on the tours and one getting there)... in fact as of now it says I went 12.6 miles today.

Now I know that this is just a calculation translating NikeFuel into miles and not meant to be a direct reflection of how many miles I went, but it still seems a little exaggerated. I don't think I expended 12.5 miles of energy today, even if I did run seven miles and do a lot of walking in between.

So it may not be accomplishing the task of accurately measuring my activity by mileage, BUT it definitely made me aware of my energy output, which I think is the intended goal of this device. Additionally, it's really comfortable (I hardly noticed it) and just looks cool. I'm looking forward to testing this thing out more and seeing how well it works under other situations (ie, exercise outside of running)...

...though I'm not sure how much of that I do.
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Comments

  1. Cindy KuzmaApril 9, 2012 at 9:40 AM

    That's funny, I've been having the opposite experience with mine ... on Friday I did a 20-mile training run, cleaned my house, and went to a bachelorette party with karaoke, and it said I only traveled 18 miles all day (and the calorie count seemed pretty low too, although maybe I've just been deluding myself on that before). But I agree, it looks cool!

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  2. The JudgeApril 9, 2012 at 10:07 AM

    Interesting... I didn't write it up but Saturday seemed a closer representation of what I actually did. But I noticed that a slower 4 mile run in the afternoon gave me a LOT more fuel points than a faster 5K in the morning. This made me wonder if maybe when I run slower I swing my arms more than when I'm running fast... maybe you have a tight running style that the FuelBand doesn't pick up on as much?

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