Weak weekly mileage and a conference report

Posted by Rachel

My weekly running mileage last week: 6
So far this running week: 7

My mileage last week can be explained (sort of) by a vacation to the Grand Canyon/Zion where I actually did hiking and stuff. This week, I have no excuse except that I had to go to a conference that was a 2 hour drive each way. The conference was for printed electronics. Even though work is boring in blogland, I did see a few talks that were professionally completely irrelevant but personally kind of interesting. So, I thought I'd share them with you guys via this blog. I'm not a tech person at all so maybe everyone knew about all these, but I still thought they were interesting.

Semi-affordable product that could actually be useful for IM training: 4iiii's Precision power meter
http://4iiii.com/4iiii-innovations-enters-the-power-meter-race-with-a-breakaway-design/
The CEO of this company gave a talk and the history he presented was really interesting. He talked about some of the first communication devices in athletics and the evolution of ANT and today's devices. Now, they have (one of?) the most affordable power meter on the market- see link above ($400).

Most interesting product that I had no idea existed: Athos' "intelligent" sports clothing
http://www.liveathos.com/
According to the claims, this sports clothing can measure heart rate (not that exciting) but also muscle activation (bingo). I think it would be super interesting to know which of my legs is lazier, and also if there are certain muscles that I'm not activating as well as I should. I saw a sample of the cycling shorts and they were really just like regular ones as far as appearance, stretchability, etc until you turn them inside out. I don't have any idea what something like this costs (although this info does seem to exist on their website), or how the data is processed.

Product that we could've guessed was coming/may already exist but I still enjoyed sitting through the talk: Adidas miCoach
http://micoach.adidas.com/
I think the hardware for this is pretty similar to what many other companies (Garmin, etc) already have as far as capability, although a few newer-ish technologies are incorporated (for example, the way they monitor heart rate). The part that I interpreted as interesting was their supporting software and data analytics to result in personalized coaching. Their technology is already being used by some professional sports teams. It is entirely possible that other companies already have this but I didn't get to watch them present at a conference, so you get this info instead.

And that concludes my extremely low level report of fun sports stuff that I got to see at a work conference. I wonder if people who ran in the 70s ever could've pictured today's Garmin and training tools, and what we'll be training with 20 years from now (assuming I can still move by then).