Heart Not Included

A while back I was offered a free heart rate monitor by Caitlin who works for Adidas in the hopes that I would review the product here at Half-Fast. In the interest of full disclosure I should mention that Caitlin also sent me a free iPod Touch and washes my car every other weekend. (Only one of those is true.)

The Adidas miCoach Connect heart rate monitor syncs with the miCoach app which is available for your iPhone, iPod Touch, Android device and even your antiquated Blackberry. Setup is quick and easy and there’s even a 12 minute assessment workout that you go through so that the miCoach can figure out your various heart rate zones and paces. That’s how it works in theory, but when I was done with my assessment it told me that it could not figure out my paces because they all looked like the same slow pace. I tried the assessment again making sure to start out nice and slow and it worked better the second time. Who’d have thought that I don’t put much distinction between a level 5 effort and a level 10 effort? Those are both out of 100, right?

Here’s some pros and cons:

Pros

• The App is free and so is the miCoach account that you create when you sign up.
• Workouts are automatically uploaded to you online account when you finish.
• I can analyze the crap out of my runs even more now.
• Easy to use.
• It provides a real time review of my effort level.
• It tells me when I can slow down.

Cons

• It sometimes tells me to speed up, this does not elicit a positive reaction.
• You have to wear that thing around your chest, though it does allow me to predictably say “I’ve got something I’ve got to get off my chest,” every time I get home. Yes, every time. My wife can vouch for that.

That’s about it. It really is one of my favorite running apps, even when I don’t use the heart rate monitor.