Additional Products to supplement our article on Spring Training

iRUN
In the 1970s, Bill Bowerman looked into his wife’s waffle iron and saw the future of running shoes. Around the same time Steve Jobs helped create the personal computer. It was just a matter of time before Bowerman’s Nike and Jobs’ Apple joined forces. The
result is the Nike + iPod Sports Kit. Special Nike shoes have a built-in pocket where users slip a sensor (you don’t need the shoes for the sensor to work), which then transmits info to a receiver plugged in to an iPod Nano. The sensor’s accelerometer measures the user’s activity and provides voice feedback on miles run and pace, as well as links to Nike Sport music. Online reviews have been pretty good, with the only cons being that you need to have a Nano and that when the pedometer battery runs out you need to buy a whole new kit. Find out more from Apple at apple.com/ipod/nike/.

 A BETTER BOTTLE
In the food chain of water bottles, the re-used drink machine brand is at the bottom, and up at the top is the SIGG bottle (pictured above and at far left). These stylish bottles can be found at a variety of retailers in myriad patterns and colours (there are even mini kids versions). But they’re more than just cool looking, they actually have some health benefits of their own.

SIGG bottles are aluminum based, which don’t leak harmful chemicals into your water. (Many reports have exposed that hard plastics contain Bisphenol-A, a harmful chemical compound.) Super light, SIGG bottles are also earth friendly: they’re both reusable and 100 per cent biodegradable.

PACE YOURSELF
Program your play list to your pace Would you like your run to be more like a movie, with perfectly paced music acting as your soundtrack? Check out jogtunes.com, where you can program a perfect play list that matches your pace from warm up to easy jog to fast jog and back. You’ll need iTunes and a portable music player to use your new play list, which uses a beatper-minute (BPM) calculator to determine the tempo of each song.

There are currently 400 songs available on the site. Frequent user Peter Andersson posts his top 50 jogtunes songs on his own website, which you can link to from jogtunes.com. Peter’s list includes: Tom Petty’s “Running Down a Dream” (BPM 170), Sheryl Crow’s “Steve McQueen” (BPM 172), “Anthem for the Year 2000” by Silverchair (BPM 178), “Beautiful” by Moby (BPM 171), “Too Bad About Your Girl” by The Donnas (BPM 163) and “Time Machine” by Black Sabbath (BPM 162).