Tuesday, March 27, 2012

MOTOACTV: A follow up

It's the little things in the life.


A sunny day at the park with my lil man.


A post-race martini (or two).


And learning that one of your running idols has one of the same gadgets as you.

Eric, who manages the local running store and placed second at this weekend's 20K (on the left), is training for the Boston marathon. A 2:35 Boston marathon. He's been chronicling his training on a Tumblr page - the good runs (5:38 pace) and the bad ones (7:21 pace), all of which make me feel slow and in awe.

This week's training highlights included that 20K and the fact that he has a MOTOACTV. You know, the same thing that I have. While I've been in love with the device, I felt sort of uncool for shunning the Garmin. Eric using it - and liking it - validates my love all the more.

"But, why?" you ask. "Why do you love it so much?"

Here are some things that I didn't get to in my first post:

*Instant, easy to read stats. When you end your workout, it gives you a summary. There are the basics, of course - duration and distance - but if you "scroll" down, you can see splits. I find this to be especially helpful after a race when I'm not going to immediately sync my workout.

*User friendly. If you are at all familiar with an iPad, iPod, iThing, you can easily figure out how to use the device. Yes, there's a learning curve but it takes about a week. With my Garmin, after two years, I was still trying to figure out how to find things.

*Cross training. The Garmin is great if you are a triathlete but not everyone swims and/or bikes. Some of us like Zumba. Or try to like it. With a new software update, there are 40 trackable activities - everything from yoga to yard work, pilates to punching. Oh, and Zumba.

*Battery life. I had heard a lot of negative feedback about the MOTOACTV's battery life before I said "yes" to the device but a software upgrade fixed many concerns. I'm able to use the device for my weekday runs without charging - and that's even when I forget to turn it off and it "sleeps" for a day.

With anything, there are some things I'd change.

*Elevation. I can see the minimum elevation, the max and net change but I'd love to see an elevation chart when I log on to the MOTOACTV website. Especially after the weekend's hilly 20K. Update/clarification: You can do this - I just hadn't figured it out. When looking at workout details, click on "Select Metric" and choose elevation.

 From Saturday's 20K

*Daily Mile. You can share your workouts on Facebook and Twitter but not Daily Mile. I like to log my miles on that site as there are a few "friends" I only have there.

*Reports. I like that Daily Mile sends me reports each week that includes my mileage and pace. It would be great to see something like that.

*Online milestone reports. The MOTOACTV will congratulate you when you end a workout if you've done something new or awesome - ran your fastest mile, burned more calories than ever before, worked out for the longest period of time or ran the farthest. However, there's no way that I know of to see those benchmarks on the site.

Have you tried the MOTOACTV? What do you think? Or, are you scared to try something new?

Disclosure: As you know, I received the MOTOACTV device for free but all opinions and suggestions are my own.

4 comments:

  1. Nice review, Kimberly! A couple comments for you...

    * Elevation: You can indeed view a graph of the elevation profile of your outdoor workout on the motoactv.com portal. To the left of the graph that shows the graph of your pace by default, you'll see you can change the metric being graphed, and you can show up to three different metrics on the graph at the same time. One of those metrics is Elevation.

    * Daily Mile: While it can't upload workouts directly from device to Daily Mile, there's a guy who created a Bookmarklet app that he called "ActvMile" that allows you to post a workout from the motoactv.com portal directly to dailymile.com with one click. http://spaetzel.com/ActvMile/ I use it and it works well. For some reason, it's currently giving an error message on the motoactv.com side when you run it, but it works anyway. The workout posts to your dailymile account just fine, despite the error message.

    Thought you may find those tips helpful.

    Happy running! :-)

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  2. First - and most importantly - look at your skinny self in that first picture - wowzers!!! You're shrinking and getting to that "racing weight" - awesome job friend! You look amazing!

    Second - 'tinis YUM!

    Third, awesome info about the motoactive. Eric never runs with music so I wonder what features he enjoys most . . . will have to ask him.

    Finally - to answer your question - too chicken to try something new, BUT I do LOVE that you can use it for those cross training activities (body pump?) in addition to running.

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  3. My Garmin just bit it so I'm in the market. Hmmmmm....

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  4. Get the lastest MOTOACTV battery update for March, it improves battry life by good amount. The update also gives you a sophisticated GOLF program, which is free only for a few week. (It has the layout of golfcourse in america and europe!)

    From what I hear from professional runners here in NYC is that regardless of some flaws with it or any product for that matter, it IS a much better and more accurate GPS Fitness product that any of the Garmin. products The SF600 Wireless headset for music is also a VERY big plus.

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