Been a distance runner for over eight years and tried out the Nike+ for about a month two years ago. Basically it's not accurate. Mine was off on pace and distance constantly. It's in the garbage now.
The way I calibrated it was I ran on a treadmill at a constant pace for 1 mile. After I'd get pace results that were off by a minute sometimes, and mileage results off by 1/10th of a mile. I calibrated it like 20 times before giving up on it.
That might not seem a lot, but to a serious runner it is. A 6:00/mile pace is far more grueling than a 6:30/mile pace. I ran a 1/2 marathon with it and Lance Armstrong congratulated me for finishing when passing the 11.5 mile marker. Uh, another 1.6 to go dude. If I let it pace me it would have ruined the race for me. Fortunately stop-watches and mile-markers still rule all.
You can look at reviews for it on Amazon. Many had the same experience I did. People still buy them though because people like stats. "You finished a marathon. Achievement unlocked!" etc...
It's more for new/amateur runners to the sport. They don't care so much about accurate pace and distance. Just having something say "You did good!" makes them happy. Running for 30 minutes is difficult enough for many, without worrying about accurate stats. And heck, if that gets you running, by golly go and buy one! The more people taking care of their bodies the better! :)
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The idea behind the uploading of your workout data online is really cool though. If it was replaced with a GPS unit, and the cost stayed affordable, lots of problems solved for runners like me. Garmin has a nice, albeit bulky, runners GPS wrist-watch unit, for $300...
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The data saying "5 uploads and you're hooked" probably has a lot of more "serious" athletes like me dropping out before hitting the 5-upload mark.
Yes, I was thinking it was likely that people dropped out after not getting any benefit from it - like your experience, and there are many ways that it might not deliver a benefit for some people, including manufacturing defects, not being able to calibrate and/or connect it, not being comfortable with the shoe itself etc. They seem to be reading an explanation into the data, which sounds plausible, and is impossible to refute if that's all the data you have.
A little data is a dangerous thing.
BTW: I assume by "off by a minute", you mean the time component of the pace ratio (time/mile) representation was off by a minute, not that its measurement of time was off by a minute. I'm not down with the joggin jargon, so that was confusing for me.
I find this particularly interesting because I run a golf handicap site with a free account that lets you enter up to 5 rounds worth of scores. At that point, the demo shuts down and you need to upgrade to lift the barrier.
The limit of 5 was chosen because it's the bare minimum needed to build a handicap (an inaccurate one, but nonetheless). But it turns out, as I've noticed over the course of the last two summers, most people upgrade when they hit the 5 round limit and then go bananas with it. I have one user who just passed the 150 round mark and most upgraded accounts have 35+ rounds.
On the other hand, a lot of the accounts that I term "dead" are demos with one or two rounds in them entered in over the course of a few weeks. They eventually never come back to even finish the demo either: because they think my site sucks or it's just not something they're motivated to keep updated.
My question is that if you were to collect that data, is it causation, or is it just correlation? Should you invest everything you can to get every user to 5 runs? Or is that just an effect of different levels of interest?
In my experience (specifically to the Nike Plus) it's a combination of both. Users who get to 5 runs on their own is certainly an indication of interest, however by encouraging users to get to 5 runs, you get a follow-on effect of "wow, look at how much running I've been doing" and further engagement. It's really satisfying building up a history and continuing to contribute to it.
It's like the Jerry Seinfeld advice to use a wall-planner to chart out your tasks. For every day you complete the task (e.g. going for a run), you put a big red X up on the chart. Then it becomes about continuing a streak, rather than a daily chore. Nike Plus is a fill-in for that wall planner (and works even better when competing with friends who can see and harass you when you break that streak).
The way I calibrated it was I ran on a treadmill at a constant pace for 1 mile. After I'd get pace results that were off by a minute sometimes, and mileage results off by 1/10th of a mile. I calibrated it like 20 times before giving up on it.
That might not seem a lot, but to a serious runner it is. A 6:00/mile pace is far more grueling than a 6:30/mile pace. I ran a 1/2 marathon with it and Lance Armstrong congratulated me for finishing when passing the 11.5 mile marker. Uh, another 1.6 to go dude. If I let it pace me it would have ruined the race for me. Fortunately stop-watches and mile-markers still rule all.
You can look at reviews for it on Amazon. Many had the same experience I did. People still buy them though because people like stats. "You finished a marathon. Achievement unlocked!" etc...
It's more for new/amateur runners to the sport. They don't care so much about accurate pace and distance. Just having something say "You did good!" makes them happy. Running for 30 minutes is difficult enough for many, without worrying about accurate stats. And heck, if that gets you running, by golly go and buy one! The more people taking care of their bodies the better! :)
--------------------
The idea behind the uploading of your workout data online is really cool though. If it was replaced with a GPS unit, and the cost stayed affordable, lots of problems solved for runners like me. Garmin has a nice, albeit bulky, runners GPS wrist-watch unit, for $300...
--------------------
The data saying "5 uploads and you're hooked" probably has a lot of more "serious" athletes like me dropping out before hitting the 5-upload mark.