Ode to running and data
Running makes me tick. I’m not a pro by any means. But with a relatively sedentary job; a dash into the fresh air gets my blood pumping; adds some good feelings to it; it also opens my mind to fresh ideas. What I enjoy as much as running itself is data. I love looking at Strava, Smashrun, Garmin Connect to study km splits, compare to previous runs on a just completed route. Look at trends, look at cumulative totals for the past week, 90 days, year. View graphs. I really enjoy this ritual. Ultimately it motivates me to keep running; to continue a trend, improve a trend, aim for a target etc.
An idea
An idea i’ve had for a while is; if this is so effective for running can it also be for other areas of life; i.e. productivity. If viewing some trend graphs can motivate me to getting an extra hours work done or complete some hideous admin task I keep pushing aside; i’ll be all the richer for it.
Self-growth goals
Although I could possibly knock this out pretty quickly as a web app; i’ve wanted to do something substantial in iOS. I’ll try and write this blog directly as I do this; in order to document the way I work. At the very least this will be useful to me. I hope I can help others passing by too.
Steps
I’ll break the process down into a number of steps; which will be sub-blog posts when completed. These will be added to whilst things evolve. Here goes!
- Vision board and high-level requirements
- Tech choices and why
- First vertical – log a time period in-app against a user-id