The bottle I currently use (Nike 600ml) takes up a lot of space in the bag, but the valve is great and it doesn’t drip at all.  You can see it in the photo for size .

The Ohyo water bottle can take 500ml and is a rigid design. At first I though it was leaky at the top, but it turns out the white ‘straw’ has to be snapped back into place or a little hole drips. It’s a bit of a strange look and design, but it does its job well and collapses down nicely. It has a tendency to get a little bigger overnight so it can’t be totally air/water tight. I don’t think I would trust it in a non-upright position storing water, but as something to fill up at the water fountain at the gym, it works fine.

Ohyo/Aquatina featured on BBC’s Dragon’s Den

The other bottle I tried was a simple Sports Direct Folding Water Bottle. It has a really simple design and I’d trust it more storing water on it’s side because of more secure top, but I don’t like its soft design for working out. Although it’s reasonably stable standing on a surface, it’s really awkward when using on a treadmill or other gym equipment when you have to be really careful how you place it back down. When you’re running outdoors, it performs much better. It’s nice to be able to squeeze a soft bottle and then put it in the back pocket when it’s empty. This version of the bottle has the ugly advert down the side – although it seems to be a standard design so hopefully other outlets aren’t so annoying with their branding.

In 1998, GB Ultra-Distance athlete Dominic Croft competed in the 13th Marathon Des Sables, an endurance event which has earned a reputation as being the ‘toughest race on earth’. This is his story.

The Toughest Race On Earth, by Dominic Croft

Not much you can say in a review for ear plugs. Some are designed to mould into your ear and let no water in and I’d imagine they don’t let in much sound either.  These  Speedo ear plugs don’t have a very tight fit as you can imagine just by looking at the photos:

I think they do let some water into the ears slowly over time, but very slowly, and it drains out quickly when your head is above water. But I think this is a good design because they stop the uncomfortable feeling of having your ear rapidly fill with water when you turn your head, and yet they are very comfortable to wear and still let you hear everything that’s going on around you.

After swimming with them I sometime forget they’re in my ears proving how comfortable they are.

My first new items are:

• Micro-Fibre towel (maybe went too small with this one as barely goes round waist).
• Replace aerosol anti-perspirant can with a roll-on
• Mini-Toothpaste
• Replaced flip-flops with ones with thinner sole

Tried smaller goggles, but comfort made me stick to the bulky ones.

Any suggestions for miniaturising? Let me know

I decided to try the Sony NWZ-W273 a try

I’m still getting used to them, but my initial thoughts are that the reviews on Amazon are accurate: If you can get a good fit then you can listen to your music for a little while, but sooner or later some water is going to get into one of your ears and after that it’s hard to get the sound back unless you dry it out fully.

I’ve found that I also have to be gentle when pushing off the wall because the water pulls them out of the ears. This  suits me because I swim in a tiny 20m pool and if I push off too fast I’m halfway up the pool already, but this would be a big issue for someone who likes to get a really good start.

Trying to keep these in the ears is a real challenge and I’m trying various different things. The publicity photos suggest that you can use your goggles strap, and in the photo this seems to look perfect…

but in reality this puts the ear buds in the wrong position – it’s hard to explain unless you try it yourself.

I’ll keep trying these, but don’t think I would recommend them for swimming. Many of the reviewers on Amazon seem to think they’re good MP3 players for running.

So I thought I’d give the Garmin Swim a try.

A proper review in time, but first thoughts after first swim:

• It’s quite good at guessing the number of strokes.
• Nice, clear, uncomplicated display and menu system.
• Drill log  feature lets you record swims where you don’t use your arms – like when you use a kick board. This could be a lot better: When you finish your drill you enter the number of meters you’ve done. Would be better a lot better if it helped you keep track during the swim by letting you press a button at the end of a length.
• If you stop for a rest, you really have to pause it. I assumed it would be able to disregard small movements:

Here’s my Adidas Smart Run being packaged to go. I tried using it for a couple of months but sadly decided that it was just not the watch for me. The Smart Run is a great idea and Adidas has done a lot of things right, but it just seems like a beta product that’s not quite ready yet.

The Good

HRM: The integrated heart rate monitor is just brilliant. Very accurate, and so much less hassle than having to put a strap around your chest and adjust endlessly.

Website and Plans: The miCoach website and the training plans available are the star of the whole system. Pick a plan (and there are loads) sync your watch, and then the system tells you to speed up or slow down. No other system comes close to being as simple as this.

Integrated MP3 player: The old miCoach Pacer  unit had voice coaching, but to listen to music at the same time you had to clip your mp3 player beside the unit and connect them with a little wire. It worked well but was a little awkward.

Wifi: It’s great that the unit just syncs with Adidas rather than having to find dongles and start up syncing software (Garmin’s new Express  syncing software is disastrous from what I’ve seen so far).

The Bad

GPS: There’s no way around it. The GPS is just worthless. On the best of runs with the Smart Run, the GPS line is scattered compared to a Garmin. It isn’t unusual to have results like this:

Yellow is where I ran. Purple is where Smart Run thinks I ran (Click to view larger).

When Smart Runs is having a bad day, the GPS can look like this (highlighted area is where it went crazy):

Battery: The battery life of the Smart Run is terrible. You’re in big trouble if you ever go for even a short run without a full charge. I’ve done a 5k run and found that less than 50% of the battery was left. Admittedly on the occasions I did do 10K the battery didn’t run out. The sad thing is that one of the recent updates for the  Smart Run was to make the screen dim to almost zero and only light up for a short time on pressing. You could change this default, but it makes me think they’re running out of ideas on how to get the battery to last and it certainly wasn’t what we were promised in the miCoach promotional material.

MP3 player: The MP3 player is about as basic as it gets. Playlist support, but no way of creating them on the watch, so you have to find some Windows software that can sync them over (rare these days). If you listen to podcasts or audiobooks then it’s a nightmare. Even though a lot of mp3 players/apps don’t support remembering place etc. at least you can usually forward fast to the place you want. With the Smart Run, you can be holding the screen for over 3 minutes to fast forward to the middle of the podcast/book.

Various Glitches: The Smart Run feels very much like a beta product with little glitches here and there too numerous to list individually. One example was on a recent run when the music from the MP3 player went down to near-zero as if the coaching was about to say something. It remained like that for the rest of the run so I couldn’t hear my music, and only when the run ended did it finally congratulate me for the run…followed by a message telling me I was half-way done with workout.

Summary

I really have high hopes for the Smart Run. I used mine for as long as I could hoping Adidas would fix the issues fast enough, but I think it’s going to be years before they’ve resolved all the issues. If you look on the miCoach forums, you’ll find a lot of people love this watch, but even they admit it has big problems and they’re putting their faith in Adidas to fix the watch with future updates.

I still love the miCoach system, and might still use the training plans even if I’m using a different watch (I have high hopes for the Polar V800).

miCoach has by far one of the  and most user-friendly and attractive training plan generators for running. It’s designed for, and only compatible with,  Adidas miCoach running gear, but there’s no reason it couldn’t be used to generate a training plan for other equipment – providing you’re willing to manually enter the info.

If you’ve bought miCoach running stuff, you’ve probably explored the miCoach site and used their extensive guides, but this post is just a quick walkthrough to show non-miCoachers why they might want to use the training plan generators available…

Sign Up on the miCoach page. it only takes a few seconds.

Click on Plans at the top and then Training Plans and you’ll be given the chance to pick from the following:

• Getting Started
• Running
• American Football
• Men’s Training
• Football
• Basketball
• Women’s Training
• Rugby
• Tennis
• Aussie Rules Football
• Baseball
• Ice Hockey
• Cricket
• Handball
• Cross Country Ski

Well, this is a Running blog so let’s try Running. We are given the choice of Cardio Plans or Strength plans.

The cardio options are:

• Run a Race
• Finish Faster
• 30 Minute Workouts
• Loose Weight
• De Stress
• Learn to Run
• Be Fit

Let’s pretend I’m going for a big one! Run a Race > Marathon

You can now select your current activity level. As I selected Marathon, it talks about Pace and times, but if I’d selected Learn to Run option, the language would have been much more casual:

The next page lets you select how often you are planning to run and what day your longest run will be on:

That’s it. Your plan is ready:

You can click on any day to see what you should be doing that day.

If you have bought some miCoach equipment, now it’s a simple case of doing the Assessment run so that equipment can decide which colour is which speed or heart zone, but you can figure this out manually for use with non-miCoach equipment.

Simply click on Settings (From the cog at the top-right) and then Training and you will be able to enter some basic information and see the default zones miCoach has.

What happens next depends on a few things.

If you have a watch that lets you enter zones, you can enter these numbers into your watch and try them out and come back to this setting page to adjust things. The good thing about the miCoach system is that you don’t have to manually tweak the number (although you can if you want to). You can simply click Adjust Zones and select the option that most accurately describes your feeling about the zones and they’ll suggest the adjustment:

Too Easy

I need to walk to stay in Green; anything faster will push me into Yellow. Select this option to make my zones harder. You should be able to run or maintain a comfortable, medium effort in the Green.

Easy

The Green is just too slow for running. Select this option to make my zones slightly harder. You should be able to run or maintain a comfortable, medium effort in the Green.

Good

My zones feel just right. No changes needed. I am able to run or maintain a comfortable, medium effort in the Green.

Hard

I have to run hard in order to reach the Green Zone. Selecting this option will make your zones slightly easier. You should be able to run or maintain a comfortable, medium effort in the Green.

Too Hard

I have to sprint in order to reach the Green Zone. Selecting this option will make my zones easier. You should be able to run or maintain a comfortable, medium effort in the Green.

Entering the zones into a non-miCoach watch like a Polar or Garmin for each run might seem a lot of work, but no more than finding a plan online. From what I’ve seen the miCoach running plans are far more comprehensive than similar ones offered by any of the other watch manufacturers.

A couple of months ago I tried the Nike Fuelband. I realise that these pedometer-style wearables are probably aimed more at people who don’t do other forms of exercise and are designed as a gentle encouragement to walk more, but I really wanted see if I could find one I liked. There seems little point in faithfully making sure you put on your running watch for every run so you can look back over your exercise, but then not including the 7k for when you take the dogs for a walk.

This won’t be a full or detailed review as I only tried it for a few days, and there are many places that do very good reviews (Recommend DC Rainmaker).

The Fuelband measures activity in NikeFuel: A proprietary format Nike has made up. While some have complained about this idea, I much prefer it as I’m not at all convinced that any of these devices would accurately record steps and calories when being used for the entire day and I’d rather have my day measured in a quantity of general movement rather than a false amount of calories.

Unfortunately I found the website was really terrible when I used it. Often links just wouldn’t work. The flash Nike has been using for years for Nike+ gives nice animations and a cool look, but is a nightmare when it doesn’t work.

Nike are only giving the most basic possible information in the most basic way.

I gave up on the FuelBand pretty quickly when I realised it gave very different results when walking the dog depending on whether I’d held the leash in the hand with fuelband or the free one.

The Good

• Long battery life (compared with similar devices)
• Attractive LED display of progress
• Simplicity is what Nike is going for and this is really easy to use.
• Big display you can glance at with bright LEDs to show your progress

The Bad

• Very expensive for what it does
• Not accurate/consistent
• Hard plastic will scratch/be scratched by laptops/desks/keyboards

I’ve always worried about using a case for a smartphone: The last time I used a case with a clear window it harmed the phone more that it protected it by scuffing the screen where the case’s plastic touched it. Hopefully Iphone screens are a little more robust and the plastic on a good armband of a higher quality.

The first thing I noticed when slipping on the armband was that there was no access to the volume controls. I thought that might be true of all Iphone armbands but a quick Google Images search revealed a lot of designs that give easy access to the controls. Since I don’t run with the standard earphones that have these controls built-in this could have been a deal breaker, but fortunately I remembered that you can also access volume controls with a double-click and double-swipe to the right.

The second think I noticed was the holes in the top for access to the earphone socket and lock buttons. They seem very big (and in the case of the lock-button a bit unnecessary) and an easy point of access for rain.

Pros

• Very snug fit so less chance of the screen being damaged by friction.
• Touchscreen very clear and responsive through plastic window.
• Armband very comfortable.
• Place to hold earphone cable.

Cons

• No access to volume controls
• Access holes for earphones/switch a water worry

Pictures courtesy of the poor camera of a borrowed Samsung Galaxy Y while my iPhone camera was otherwise engaged – being in the photos