Jay Littlepage: Life In Balance?

sensors where you least expect them

Inspired by Mike's pictures of the sensors being placed in Devil's Slide i've been trying to be more observant of just how ubiquitous network devices are in the world around us.

Yesterday all I needed to do is look down at my shoe. Attached to the lace was a thing called a ChampionChip. Let me digress, and i'll come back to this.

One of the things I did during my little break from Sun was get myself back in shape. I've lived now in one of the most fit cities in the world (Boulder, Colorado) for the past 7 years and during that time have basically been a slug. One of the things I realized about myself is that i'm competitive and goal oriented (duh) and during the last few years I was "jogging" with no goal in mind rather that "training" for something.

So now the creaky old body is in training for this year's Bolder Boulder on Memorial Day. I've run the race (using that term loosely) every year since I moved to Colorado with the exception of last year, when I was recovering from a back injury. But of the estimated 50,000 people who will participate in the event this year, most will be happy just to finish, and the majority will walk. So where's the motivation to train?

It comes in two forms. First, if you don't want to be behind 40,000 walkers you need to run a qualifying time to get into a seeded wave and start in front of them. The second is having an 18 year old daughter who has gotten herself into great shape running and playing soccer at school this year, and whom has inherited dad's competitive gene. My motivation this year? Erin is going to be faster than me some day, but not this year. Her goal? Beat dad. Simple.

So back to the ChampionChip. It is an RFID device that does one thing - transmit a unique id when it passes through a magnetic field. At the 5k race I ran yesterday the runners passed over mats at the start and finish lines that generated the magnetic field, which activated the chips, which sent their ids, which were captured and timestamped. Subtract the times and you get a very accurate race time.

So Erin and I ran qualifying races 1000 miles apart, each with an rfid chip tied to our shoes. Within a couple of hours I could see her time online, and she could see mine. Twenty seconds separated our times. 26 more training days til Bolder Boulder, time to get to work!