NYTimes

July 6, 2009, 5:14 pm

Turning Exercise Into Data

Your Marathon

Coaching, tips and inspiration to get you race-ready.

• Sign up for a Run Well Training Plan
• Reviewing the Run Well Tracker
• Finding a Running Buddy Online
• Technology for Your Training

A friend recently sent me a link to his morning run. It showed the time he ran, a graph depicting his speed and the 4.76 mile distance he covered. It was just an ordinary morning jog, broken down as data supplied by a Nike gadget attached to his shoe.

As Wired magazine explains in a recent article, companies like Nike and Garmin, with their focus on capturing the personal metrics of exercise, have inspired a data-driven exercise movement and changed the way a generation of athletes is working out.

Call it Living by Numbers — the ability to gather and analyze data about yourself, setting up a feedback loop that we can use to upgrade our lives, from better health to better habits to better performance.

Few things illustrate the power and promise of Living by Numbers quite as clearly as the Nike+ system. By combining a dead-simple way to amass data with tools to use and share it, Nike has attracted the largest community of runners ever assembled — more than 1.2 million runners who have collectively tracked more than 130 million miles and burned more than 13 billion calories.

With such a huge group, Nike is learning things we’ve never known before. In the winter, people in the US run more often than those in Europe and Africa, but for shorter distances. The average duration of a run worldwide is 35 minutes, and the most popular Nike+ Powersong, which runners can set to give them extra motivation, is “Pump It” by the Black Eyed Peas.

The company couldn’t have gathered all that information, and gained all those insights, if it hadn’t reconfigured how runners approach their sport. Nike has done more than create a successful product; it has fundamentally changed the way more than a million people think about exercise.

It’s a fascinating look at both running culture and human behavior. Read the full story, “The Nike Experiment: How the Shoe Giant Unleashed the Power of Personal Metrics.”