Power Songs

When Lynette and I run, we use our Nike+ chips and iPod Nanos to keep track of our time and distance. It's a great way to lose yourself in the workout and let it worry about how long or how far you have left to go. You can set a workout to be a particular distance, or a particular length of time, and a soothing voice will periodically chime in via your earbuds and tell you when you've hit certain checkpoints (every mile for distance and every 5-10 minutes for time).

Another feature I just figured out how to use is the Power Song. You can choose any song that's loaded on your iPod to be your Power Song. During your workout you can trigger it by holding down the button on the iPod. Last night I chose "Get It On" by Chase as my Power Song. It's exactly 3 minutes long, so when the nice robot lady said "3 minutes to go," I pressed the button and started the song. I immediately found a gear I didn't have before, and kicked into it. What a great feeling. I don't normally listen to music during my runs, but I think I'm going to start using my Power Song more often.

I recently found a site called slowgeek that uses the Nike+ API to pull down publically available data about all Nike+ users who haven't set their profile to "private." They offer an alternative way to view your workout data, but one of the more interesting things they've done is to pull data about everyone's Power Songs. Turns out Survivor is extremely popular with the running crowd - over 700 people have "Eye of the Tiger", making it easily the most popular Power Song. Given all this data, I had an interesting idea - make a playlist consisting exclusively of all the most popular power songs. This could easily backfire: if I kicked into that gear I used durinig "Get It On" during the whole run, I'd burn out within a half mile. Maybe it's worth a shot, though.