because time has no roll back.: New Ways To Stay on Track With Resolutions

Daniel Giovanni, a traceur and a Nike Plus user. (JG Photos/Lisa Siregar)

New Ways To Stay on Track With Resolutions

Twice a week, Daniel Giovanni gets up at 5:30 a.m., puts on his running gear and does laps for an hour around the Bung Karno stadium in Senayan, South Jakarta.
“I’ve measured the circumference of the stadium with my motorcycle. It’s exactly one kilometer,” Daniel said on Tuesday morning after his run.
Daniel is a traceur , which refers to someone who practices parkour , a sport from France that involves moving efficiently from one obstacle to another in a built up environment. Advanced traceurs leap without harnesses from building to building, often quite high up. But running is the first skill they must master.
As the new year approaches, Daniel said his health resolutions were to maintain his workout schedule and add to his endurance. For his training he relies on technological gadgets to track his progress, as well as using Twitter — the micro-blogging Web site that sprang into the mainstream this year. Twitter allows him to keep in touch and compare notes with other athletes.
Daniel recently bought a Nike Plus Sport Kit at a midnight sale. The kit includes a receiver and sensor that allows runners to track their progress, giving them data on distance covered, calories burned, number of steps taken and the time they spent training. It works in conjunction with an iPod, which receives the data from the sensor. Daniel uses an iPod Nano, but the device also works with the newest generation of iPod Touch or the iPhone 3GS.
There are also special Nike Plus running shoes available that have a slot for the sensor, but Daniel said you can slip the sensor into any shoes. “My shoes are not Nike, but I can still use this sensor to help me keep track of my workout results.”
Every time he finishes running, Daniel pulls his iPod Nano out of his pocket to see how he went.
“Knowing how I’m going motivates me to run faster,” he said, adding that since he has been able to measure his progress he has found he has been able to increase his pace.
Daniel also discovered a Twitter group of Nike Plus users who share their running results with one another. So when he returns home after training he synchronizes his iPod with his iTunes, which uploads the results graphic to Nike’s official Web site for archiving. The Web site automatically sends his results to his Twitter account.
He said that having friends online to compare results with has given him even more motivation, “especially after one of [his] Twitter friends started the GLTD challenge.” GLTD stands for ganyang lemak to demak , which roughly translates as “burn fat to the max.”
When running, Daniel listens to PodRunner, a free podcast of workout music. There is a variety of music on the podcast, all categorized by the tempo, or beats per minute. Daniel has four songs with different beats per minute on his iPod. He said any song with 130 BPM or above was a good choice for running, but if you were new to the sport, you may want to subscribe to PodRunner Interval, a similar free podcast that lets you take it easy with a slower BPM every few minutes.