The website is free, unless you get the premium version, which has some extra options. As soon as I signed up and clicked around for all of seven whole seconds, I was totally hooked. There is so much fun information! For example, as soon my Garmin Connect info was uploaded, a fun fact popped up that I tend to run 52% shorter distances when the temperature is below freezing.
My favorite part of the site is where, on each individual run, there is a section called "Notable". There, it gives you fun facts about that particular run... things like, "This was your fastest 5K in a month", or "This was the most elevation gained in 6 months", or "This was your first run in Oregon", or "This was your highest average heart rate in 3 months", etc. There are SO many different notable facts! It's really fun to look through some of my old runs (dating back to 2010).
You can quickly glance at fun facts and data based on the year, the month, the week, or the day (of any time frame you choose). For example, with one little click, I can see that in 2010, the day of the week that I most often ran on was Monday, with an average of 6.1 miles, 44 times throughout the year; and the day that I ran on the least often was Saturday, average of 8.3 miles, 9 times.
Another click, and I can see that in 2013, my average overall pace was 9:09/mile; my average run length was 5.8 miles; my average number of days per week that I ran was 5.1; and that 92% of the time, I ran in the morning.
Here, you can see at a glance for the entire year (any year) the distances run. You can then click on those little boxes to pull up the individual runs:
The site also has "badges" that you can earn, and ordinarily, that is not something that motivates me. But once I started looking through the different badges, I was thinking about how I wanted to work on earning them! Here are just a few examples:
Run 75 miles in any calendar month.
Run a total of 858 miles (the distance from NYC to Chicago)
Complete 10 runs in a month slower than 10:00/mile pace
Complete 10 runs in a month faster than 8:00/mile pace
Run at least 10 days in March
Run 10 runs that start before sunrise and end after sunrise.
Do 10 runs after sunset on a full moon.
And LOTS of others. Pretty crazy, right? I think it would be a lot of fun to work on getting the badges--it's a different sort of running goal than just aiming for a PR. As I train for my 10K, I'm going to start working on some of the badges.
There is one coming up that has to be done on the shortest day of the year:
Since that opportunity only comes up once a year, I'm going to make it a point to do it on the 22nd!
Something else that is fun for each run is that it gives you a food equivalent for the amount of calories you just burned. For example, after an 18-mile run I did in April 2012...
(You could choose to see a healthy food equivalent instead, but where's the fun in that?)
Anyway, I have had way too much nerdy fun with this website (thank you SO much, Gigi!), so I just wanted to share it. Here is a link to join, if you're interested (I get "badge" credit for referring people). There is so much to share that this is only a tiny part of it. If you're a numbers nerd, like I am, you will probably love the site!
Anyway, today was a good weigh-in! I maintained from last week...
My calories were pretty high this week--my average calorie intake per day was 1,949. I didn't plan to do that, but it's nice to know that I can eat that much and maintain my weight, at least. Because I've been focusing on going for a walk every single day, even if it's just a short one, my steps were higher this week, too (just under 10,000 on average per day).
Two weeks down on maintenance and it's going well so far :)
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