I’ll be honest – I had never been someone who could even tolerate, let alone LOVE running. I was always suspicious (and incredibly jealous) of those people who could run for hours and hours, race after race. Those people who said running cleared their head and gave them a borderline euphoric ‘runner’s high’. I always wondered how could I become one of these mythical creatures that relished putting one leg in front of the other again and again and again.
Until I became one, too. My secret? It’s so simple you’ll scoff – setting goals. And fortunately there’s one nifty little device that seriously helped with that.
The MyFit Pod from The Athlete’s Foot is a fitness tracker that clips easily onto any running shoe, providing unique, foot-based metrics to help you track and improve your performance. It measures:
- Your cadence (the average number of times your foot hits the ground in one minute)
- Your leg swing (how high you kick your foot after push off)
- Your rate of impact (the time your body has to deal with ground force)
- Your foot strike (which part of your foot touches the ground first)
- Your ground contact (the amount of time your foot spends on the ground)
- Your stride length
- Your pace
- Your distance
- Your duration
The MyFit Pod then combines all of this data together to calculate your Runficiency Score™, the more efficient you are, the less energy you’re using, the better runner you are, basically.
MyFit Pod
When I first started on my quest (yes, dramatic much) to love running, I knew the best way to keep myself motivated was by seeing how much I could improve each time. A bit of healthy competition with myself. After strapping on the MyFit Pod (with no need to charge or press a whole bunch of confusing buttons) and going on my first, very short, run I checked the MyFit app to see my results. The app also shows you what results you should be aiming for, and I was way off when it came to optimum ground contact and leg swing.
On my next run, these factors were top of mind. I set a goal to improve each run by 500 metres to a kilometre. The small goals were made even more achievable when I could evaluate my running analytics to better my performance. Soon my leg swing was in the preferred high range, my cadence was increasing, my ground contact was diminishing and my Runficiency Score ™ was improving. Eventually I was smashing five, six and seven kilometre jogs, and getting that sweet, sweet endorphin rush. I was one of those people, I was hooked.
Now, I’m no Steve Moneghetti… Yet. So the MyFit pod is staying firmly strapped to my shoelace because there’s plenty of room for improvement and plenty more goals to smash (hello, half marathon).
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