The Nike+ Human Race

Sep 2 2008

So over the last couple of months, I’ve started to run a little bit. When I was in Japan, I ran around the city, when I was in D.C., I ran around the city. I wanted a way to track my runs, and I found out about the Nike+ system that includes a foot pod that works with your iPod Nano and iTunes to track your time and distance and upload them to Nike+.

After I uploaded my first run, I found out about the Nike Human Race 10k.

Basically, Nike was putting on the World’s largest running event. In 25 world cities, you could go down an run a 10k race on an official course. But with the Nike+ system, anyone anywhere could register and run their 10k and then upload their results.

I’ve never ran anything official (if you don’t count grade school track events), so I did it. A few weeks back, I ordered my official race jersey with my unique # on it and I got up the morning of the 31st, headed down to the Provo River trail in Orem, and took off. I finished in 56 minutes. My goal was to run the 10k under 60 minutes. I was pretty much alone, I passed the occasional person, but they probably had no idea what I was doing. It was sort of cool to know that I was running and around the world there were hundreds of thousands of others running too.

Self portrait after completing the run: