So, I bought the Nike+ adaptor for the iPod nano the other day and have been having fun trying it out so far. The sensor itself is pretty small, about as big as a quarter and as thick as a half-used pad of post-it notes. Since I don’t have Nike+ shoes, I just tuck the sensor under my shoelaces. Doing that instead of having it in my insole seems to work pretty well so far — though its a little insecure there. Maybe I’ll try the velcro-tape trick I read about to secure it to my sneakers.

There are also downloadable workouts with paced music and voice-over coaching advice available from iTunes to match the release of the new product. The ones that I’ve tried are very challenging — I only made it about half-way through the endurance one on my first try. Someday, I’m sure I’ll make it all the way.

Once you have recorded a few runs, you can upload your performance data to nikeplus.com to chart your results and track your gains over time. Its a pretty neat site, with compelling features on the whole. Being that this is an innovation blog, I think it warrants talking about some innovative things that could be done with the information being collected:

1) Allow bloggers (like me) or MySpace denzians to add a widget to their sites that gives an at-a-glance view of my running performance. Making a public statement on fitness levels can play on the whole psychology of escalation of committment - improving the fitness level of the average mouse potato would definitely be a good thing!

2) Give access to the aggregate data to researchers and economists. I can only imagine what Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner would do with info about how people exercise — other than continue to point out the fact that we usually don’t. On that note, I just discovered their blog: Freakonomics. It’s definitely something to add to your daily reading list.

Now, get off your duff and go out for a run!