CG's Ramblings

This is week 2 of my four week review of Adidas miCoach. Read the whole series here.

Continuing with my ongoing review of the miCoach, I did a couple of outdoor runs this week -- a difficult 8K in the getting-really-hot afternoon sun and then hit the road for late Sunday morning for a good 15K.

As I mentioned last week, I would try adjusting the heart rate settings and see if I could stay in the "zone" a little more than last week. The factory HR settings seemed fine to me, so I reverted to that. And here are the results:

So I stayed a lot above the green zone again (which was my target zone for the run), although the pace was fairly easy (maybe the HR was high due to the sun). I have decided not to focus too much on this zone business for plain and simple runs for now. I will also try to squeeze in an interval training run this week to see how my heart rate varies with it.

Achievements, history and training journal

A few other niceties I discovered on the website:

Achievements

This comes with the Dashboard view (which gives a summary of the latest workout) -- shows "lifetime" achievements for five of the parameters that it tracks: time, calories, distance, heart rate and pace.

History

Bar graphs showing historical running time, grouped by either year, month, week or day.

Training journal

A list view for the completed workouts -- loads of information in a compact view. Nice.

Workout export and backups

One issue that I do have with the webiste at the moment is that there doesn't seem to be anyway for me to export or backup all the workout data that I am uploading here. While Adidas has done a great job with the website, I am not too happy about not having any local backup of my workout data. And if the website doesn't remain upto the mark later on, it will be good to have an alternative (I don't see why Adidas would make this easy to happen though).

Linux support

I complained to Adidas via their feedback link about the lack of Linux support. Got a response back (the same day) that they don't support Linux for now and the "suggestion will be passed on to the responsible department". Guess that means nothing for now :( If you are a developer who works on miCoach you would have one very grateful customer if we saw Linux support soon!

Stride sensor battery issue

One issue I have encountered a few times now is that when the it is switched on, Pacer refuses to detect the stride sensor until I take out the stride sensor's battery and put it in again. This is really annoying if I have to do this everytime I need to use miCoach. I wrote to Adidas about it and they replied back that this might either be an issue with low battery or with pairing.

What's next?

So my training log shows that I have done about 43K worth of outdoor running in the last couple of weeks. That's a bit on the lower side -- but then again, summers are here! Still, I want to hit the 100K mark for four weeks, so I will be aiming to do about 60K worth of running in the coming two weeks. I will also try to squeeze in a couple of interval training sessions and hope that miCoach's "coaching system" will prove a little more useful here.

Labels: micoach, micoach-review, running

// posted by Chaitanya Gupta @ 11:25 AM