A.M. 10.1 with Jeff in 1:14:25. Did explosions and two fat miles - first in 5:45, second in 5:40. Caught up to Mark Robison, BYU head track coach, and ran with him for a little bit before starting our last fat mile. He was going a decent pace for his age - a bit sub-8:00.
P.M. Of all things, did something that may sound a bit out of character for me. I spent the afternoon messing around with Wii Remote. But it was in character. I did not all of a sudden turn into a videogame bum. In fact, I only needed the remote, that's all. The reason for my interest was that I found out it had a hackable built-in Bluetooth-capable accelerometer. The hacking was a success - I got it to talk to Nokia 770 and was able to gather some acceleration data while running holding both. The cool thing about it that if you found a way to attach it to the foot, or even to the body is a stationary position where it would not bounce, tilt, or slide around too much, you could pick up ground contact time, air time, and stride frequency. From which you can extrapolate running pace as well after calibration. Then the next step is to get a PDA Watch with Bluetooth, hack it so it will run Linux, and you've got your own magic running watch that could potentially tell you all kinds of stuff about your form. Wii Remote is a bit too clumsy, and too expensive (I borrowed this one from a friend), especially if you wanted to have two of them, one on each foot. So I ordered a Wireless Playchuck from Amazon for $25 (including shipping) for more experiments. Maybe in a year or two we will have more cheap Bluetooth accelerometers small enough to be attached to the foot. But for now, I'll have to setting for this.
In theory, of course, I could just run with Nokia 770, but it has two problems. One, it is too big. And two, the screen is not designed for outdoor use. So I am eying M600 wrist cell phone for the watch unless I can find something cheaper. I do need to figure out how to put Linux on it. But I do not need to worry about it yet, as Benjamin's Nokia 770 is good enough for development purposes. Ran 2 with Jenny in 19:08. Julia ran 1.5 with us in 14:15. 0.5 with Joseph in 5:53.
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