Health: January 2009 Archives

In The New York Times, Steve Regenold describes how, as telecommuting becomes the norm rather than the exception, places like Crested Butte, Colorado have attracted those ready for immediate escape. “Working from a vacation home — be it a beachside condo or a mansion in the mountains — has become increasingly common as broadband Internet, expanding cellphone coverage, and overnight courier delivery service have added flexibility to many corporate careers.”

“Much like a shot of tequila – an entertaining idea but one that leaves you feeling bitter and regretful – the prospect of a muscle-toning bike ride through the rolling English countryside all too often descends into a grit-caked, coccyx-maiming journey along a traffic-choked B road. But relocate the experience into a gym, and those demoralising exterior hazards are replaced by that even deadlier fitness adversary: boredom.” In the U.K. Telegraph, Nick McGrath writes about the new Xdream “virtual” training bike, which provides an ersatz mountain-biking experience for the indoors biker. It’s great failure: it doesn’t challenge the rider’s balance.

We’ve seen a couple of different mashups that use the Google API to measure distance traveled by foot or wheel, but so far the Gmaps Pedometer is the most useful and user-friendly. As the Gmaps Pedometer site says, “This is a little hack that uses Google’s superb mapping application to help record distances traveled during a running or walking workout. Why? As a runner training for a marathon for the first time, I found myself wishing I had an easy way to know the exact distance a certain course is. Looking at Google Maps, and knowing there was a vibrant community of geeks hacking it, I knew there had to be a way.”

The tool has a couple of very cool features: in addition to automatically following road curves and corners, it marks every one mile distance, allows you to save your route to a unique URL, and even calculates your calories burned based on personal weight.