Tuesday Tools and Tips

Welcome to a new weekly series called Tuesday Tools and Tips. This will be a series to help the traveler and runner with various tools and tips that will help to make your training and traveling easier. If you have suggestions or questions that would apply to this weekly series, feel free to contact me and let me know and I will work it in!

Tuesday Tools and Tips

What? Another series?! Yes, I am slowly introducing more series to help consolidate various topics under more specific headings. Hopefully the new Tuesday Tools and Tips series will be a help. There are many different tools and tips that we will look at weekly. Many of you will know about some of these, but my hope is to introduce those to the rest that might no know.

Dailymile

If you have been running for any length of time, I am sure you know about Dailymile. However, if you are like me, you may have heard of it but you never knew how helpful it can be. Dailymile is like Facebook for the runner. It is an online training log that you can share with your friends. It helps to motivate you to push harder, you can check out your local competitor’s training, you can keep track of a large amount of your running data, and you can follow some really great runners to find out a little bit about their training.

To begin, Dailymile is free. They offer a paid version ($49 annually) that gives you more control and access to various aspects of the website. I do not currently have a paid subscription. I find that the free version gives more than enough of the data I am looking for from a log. If you want to sign-up, go to dailymile and click Get Started.

Once you fill in your basic information, you are good to go! It takes you about 1 minute to get setup. After that, you can start logging your workouts. Here are some of the different ways you can log your miles:

• Manually
• Garmin Connect
• Nike+
• iPhone apps such as: Electric Miles, Runmeter, runens, Cyclemeter, Go Couch to 5K, LogYourRun, Kinetic, Guerrilla Cardio, iSmoothRun, Jog Log, Walkmeter, Runner’s Log, RunGap, Bit of Exercise
• Android apps such as: runstar, Tracks2Miles, DailyMiler, Run Free, Dailyworkout

Workouts

There are a multiple amount of workouts that you can use to add to your workout results. These workouts are:

• Running
• Fitness
• Cycling
• Swimming
• Walking
• Commute
• Weights
• Yoga
• Cross Training
• Spinning
• Rowing
• Rock Climbing
• Elliptical
• Core Fitness
• Hiking
• Crossfit
• Cross Country Skiing

Social Features

• You can connect and post from within Dailymile to Facebook and Twitter
• All of your Dailymile friends can see your workouts and you their’s
• You can post videos and photos
• You can post on your friends’ workouts and they on yours
• They send you a weekly e-mail to let you know of your weekly workouts and your friends
• You can send motivation, good jobs, get well, and a host of other motivational messages

Other Features

• You can map your route
• You input your distance, workout type, time, how good you felt, and an optional note
• From those parameters, it will figure what your calorie burn was
• With the click of a button, it shows your lifetime stats

This is a great tool and one that I use whenever I run. I always am eager to get back home and post my workout and to see how I and my friends are doing. It takes less than a minute to quickly enter your workout and then it will keep all of that info and is always there for your reference. Before Dailymile, I never kept a running log, but now that I use this, I absolutely love it. If you want to become friends with me, go here and send me a friend invite. I would love to join your Dailymile community!