I finished my first virtual marathon last week and have been riding a runner's high since. I thought I would compile some tech I use to track my runs and some of the options runners can use to track their metrics because, well, data good!
I've been using the Nike Run Club app for about a year. I typically run pretty minimalist since I don't like wearing a running belt or pack, so just have the pockets in my shorts. I use an old tiny Android phone that's quite light and small so I can slip it into a pocket. Nike runs just fine on it, though it can take a few minutes to get a GPS lock -- I feel this is an app issue rather than a phone issue because Runkeeper locks very quickly.
I manually download MP3s on it, a mix of songs and podcasts. Up until recently I was able to use the FM radio since I use wired headphones. I now use a cheap Bluetooth pair which work great, but lose the FM antenna. The advantage of FM radio was battery savings: using the FM radio barely registered any battery usage compared to the stock Music app. To create playlists, I use Playlist Creator since it allows import of folders and individual MP3 files no matter where they are stored. These playlists then get picked up the stock Music app.
Nike Run Club is great for it's content. It has podcasts that are synced to your run, either in distance or time so it's nice to hear encouragement and training tips offered at the right times. I always need reminding to start slow and finish strong! There are great guest speakers from Olympic athletes to celebrities to amateurs. The variety is nice to stave off boredom. The guided runs also have lots of choice in their distance or time or focus. There are short runs, long ones, "easy win" runs and stress reliever runs.
The biggest reason I went with Nike was the training programs. I has customizable plans for the typical runs, like 10K, half and full marathons. You input your weight, age, time commitment and how many weeks until your event and it spits out a unique plan. Or so I thought, it seems the plans are minor tweaks to the publicly available Nike plans. Similar to other runners, I didn't notice that much of a difference or changes to the plan according to my results or the "baseline" run. I will say that the plan was very doable, so maybe the tweaks were there and enabled my completion!
There are a few disadvantages to the Nike app. First is the GPS issues; I've constantly had issues with GPS lock and wildly incorrect waypoint logging. Distances also tend to be inaccurate which leads to either incredible records or dismal failure. I had the crash maybe three or four times when saving a run which forces you to manually enter the stats (if you can remember them).
Perhaps the biggest issue of the Nike app is it's walled garden. It's painfully difficult to export or import stats. You need to rely on third-party hacks since Nike has shut down it's API. I use Rungap to export activities and highly recommend it. It's very smooth and simple and offers quite a lot in its free tier, even backing up to Dropbox. It converts the Nike info into a proprietary JSON format but since it's all text readable there are a handful of converters available. I opted to just purchase an upgrade for a few dollars and let Rungap convert all my activities to GPX format, the universal standard for activity tracking. It can also concert to FIT and TCX if you need those filetypes.
Another big reason to upgrade Rungap was to simply import these activities into another fitness tracker. I've decided to switch to Runkeeper, an app I used before Nike, just to see if the GPS tracking was better. Rungap handled importing all my activities (about 130 of them) flawlessly and in just a few minutes.
A few more links to using running metrics: there are a number of GPX viewers that let you visualize runs and pull more information out, depending on your waypoint and fitness tracker. I like GPS Visualizer, an online viewer, since it has a number of output options and can pull elevation data (since my phone doesn't have an altimeter). GPSMaster also works well as an offline viewer.
