Following Dublin Marathon last Monday I have done nothing but eat and bum around. I haven’t put anything on that resemble sports kit, very odd for me – I don’t recall a time since Xmas where I have done NOTHING, even after April I had to go out for a run.

I say nothing, that is technically a lie – a while back I got sent a copy of Just Dance 2 for the Wii to play and review, I guess it relates to the fitness side of the blog which I rarely focus on. It has been on my side waiting for an opportune moment to come and on Sunday afternoon it happened. Anyone who knows me well will be aware that I am a legend on the dance floor and this game is a little bit beneath my ability. Strutting my stuff around the living room to all of the best tunes ranging from Avril to Britney through to the Monster Mash (rather apt as it was Halloween). I’m pretty certain my dance coach would be well chuffed at my ability to hit perfect almost all of the time, he will be ringing me any time soon to add me to the Justin Timberlake backing crew I’m sure.

Anyway, if you have made it to now I’d like to think you have seen through my sarcasm, when it comes to dance I have two left feet and have learnt all my moves from the movie Hitch (make the pizza, chalk the snooker cue etc). Actually that’s a lie, that insinuated I would actually get up to dance in the first place, which I wouldn’t. However, I did play this game and when in ‘duet’ mode with Laura it was actually quite good fun even if she clearly tried a lot more than me (apparently you are supposed to move your legs even if the Wii doesn’t know this!) I can also see how it would be quite good for keeping fit. On a couple of dances, even with my limited ability, I was breaking a sweat. Most of my Wii games get played and go back into the draw. I think this one will be out for Xmas Day 2010 in all its glory – that gives me about 50 days to get good at it

Anyways, think I’ll stick to running in the future, I *think* I’m a little bit better at that!

About a month ago in Runners World mag I saw an advertorial for a new style “body monitor”. I have always been one for gadgets when i’m keeping fit and for anyone that has followed my blogs on and off they will have seen reviews for nike+ kits and are possibly also aware that I now run with a garmin watch which I extract feeds for to show pretty maps on myself. So with that in mind I got in touch with the KiFit guys to see if they had any interface and API available which would make there site a lot more appealing to me by the fact I could extract information and show you what I was eating, doing etc on my blog…

About the same time last year I contacted a similar (cue comments about the tech’s not being similar) organization called MiCoach (I believe) who offered no facility to access data either and weren’t really prepared to talk to me with my techy hat on, however, the people at KiFit seemed a lot more responsive offering me a bit of a demo and also a demo account on there site to see if I could extract what I wanted and whether getting on the device would interest me.

A few days ago over the phone I had a chat with one of the chaps who worked with KiFit and we poked around the system, the user interface seems well constructed and very user friendly. The UI came as a bit of a surprised to me, it felt very polished (however after a bit of digging the Activity Mgr System looks like it has been around for a little bit longer than KiPerformance) and obvious. When you log in you are presented with a very shiny interface that shows your day stats pulling information from an armband you are supposed to wear 24/7 which measure motion, skin response, skin temp, heat flux and steps.

For me, one of the interesting displays is that relating to sleep patterns, something that always intrigues me. Sometimes I wonder whether I have had a bad run because of a poor night sleep or whether it is just another one of those “runners excuses”…

This device can tell whether you are reaching deep sleep and how often you stir during the night. On top of this there are some nicety, how much physical activity your are doing each day is nice and considering this is supposedly on you all the time it measures everything which extends what the Garmin does (plus the Garmins battery life is shocking so would only last half a day!)

The online platform integrates in your daily food eating patterns which is pretty cool, but whether I would have the will power to store this every day would be interesting, the tool doesn’t quite seem invasive enough to force you to do it – with something that has to be done almost daily you have to have a lot of will power to maintain this. It would be interesting to see whether there stats show peoples inclination to insert dietary data dwindles as time progresses?

Anyway, after a few hours poking around at the UI am I interested? At the moment I would say yes, however, the biggest niggle I have for this device is cost. You can’t use the device without a subscription and you pay a monthly fee for the privilege. Whilst the monthly fee won’t break the bank alone couple this with a gym membership etc and the costs still escalate. Also once you have purchased the device who is to say that the website will still be up and working in 6months time or a new OS come out that renders the device inoperable. I actually think that it would make sense to have both an offline and online system. Garmin have a similar model, sure there offline app is pants but you still have that facility – plus with companies such as Garmin, Nike, Nokia (to an extent) who offer online exercise management tools I think you can rest assured a little bit due to the shear size of the corporation backing it, i’m not so sure about the KiFit, although I would like to be proved wrong…

I will hopefully be granted a little more time to play and poke before my trial account gets revoked – I love the system and if I could extend my running data with all this information there would be a statistics overload on this blog and perhaps I could possibly move to the next stages of health and fitness which is watching the diet.

It gets an initial thumbs up from me except for the monthly subscription costs, I think anyone serious about training either over a long period or up to an upcoming event could seriously benefit from this online diary. I suspect if I used this during my next 12 weeks of marathon training I would have some pretty awesome data on the system…Oh and yes, I managed to get data from there site in order to put on my blog – well I’m half way there, can log on, extract data now just creating the code to display it in a nice way…

If you missed the link at the top of the article you can visit the KiPerformance site here. Anyway – back to running I go…

N

(n.b. I should prob point out I haven’t actually got to use one of these devices or seen what they physically look like I have only had access to the website and sales talk.)