Running technology

This is the story of how something as low-tech as putting one foot in front of the other wouldn't have become a hobby for me if not for technology.

You see, I was always the slowest kid in class. Not intellectually, but physically. I'm velocity-challenged. One year, in elementary school we had something called "Field Day" where the whole school did different physical activities for ribbons. Let's just say parents were not surprised when I came home with only a participation ribbon.

About 5 years ago I was working in a newsroom in Phoenix and I got a call from Nike. They wanted us to try out their new Nike+ system, so they asked my shoe size and sent me a pair of shoes with a tracking chip in them. The chip allows you to track how fast you run, how far you run, and shows you graphs of how much you've progressed.

I tried it for a week, and I was hooked. For all those times the PE teachers in school had made us run, it took a tiny little chip to pique my interest. Instead of feeling like the slow kid, I just felt like I was accomplishing something, and those graphs proved it. First 10, then 20, the 50 and a hundred miles!

I later moved around and stopped running as much as I used to. It was just in the past year or so that I decided to get back in to running. I'd decided to quit smoking, and running was a good complement to quitting. If you want a quick reminder of how bad smoking is for you, try smoking a bunch of cigarettes one night, then going for a run the next day.

I realized, though, that I didn't have a plan. I knew I didn't have it in me to just go outside and run a couple miles, but I didn't know where to start. That's when I found the "Couch to 5K" running plan (sometimes abbreviated C25K). This plan, posted at coolrunning.com, has helped thousands of people running a full 5K distance (about 3 miles) in around two months.

The plan has you walk a bit, then run, then walk to catch you breath, then run...and each week the amount of running increases and the amount of walking decreases until you eventually can run the whole way.

The concept was clear to me, but I still didn't have an easy way to know when to run and walk. I didn't want to jog around with a slip of paper and a stopwatch, timing each motion exactly. That's when I found the brilliant Robert Ullrey. He had the idea to create a Couch to 5K podcast, and this idea alone makes him a superhero in my book.

Instead of jogging around with a pad and a stopwatch, he just recorded some upbeat music, and tells you in the podcast when to walk and when to run. He even included a 5 minute warm up and cool down (which I still do now). All you need to do is press play and go. I've tried to find him on the Internet to email him a note of thanks, but the site was posted several years ago, and he doesn't seem to have any working contact information anymore.

Thanks to the podcast, I've run several 5Ks now, and even ran a 10K in Atlanta on the 4th of July. I had set a goal of running it in under an hour, and I did it! But I seemed to stop improving. Running was getting a bit tedious, and it felt like no matter how fast I ran when I trained, I just couldn't run much faster.

For Christmas I got the Polar FT4 heart rate monitor. I chose it because it has a strap that goes around your chest to measure your heart rate, and a watch that displays it and stores the data. An added bonus: the strap talks to most cardio equipment in the gym, so you can just wear the strap, and the machine knows its you, and shows your heart rate on the display.

So, I decided to run another 10K with this fancy device, and it taught me that I've been running too fast. My maximum heart rate is 191, which means I should be training at around 133 to 143 beats per minute. Another series of calculations showed me that my optimal fat burning zone is around 151 bpm. Problem is, every time I ran, my heart rate was, on average, at 171. I'd discovered why I was getting burned out: I was running too fast.

At first, keeping my heart rate at 151 was really challenging. I was barely running...it almost felt like I could walk faster than I was running...but after a few weeks I could run much faster while keeping my heart rate at the same level. This meant my body was getting better conditioned to running, and it made running longer distances immensely easier. Tedious, because I barely felt like I was moving at first, but definitely doable.

Now I'm training for a half marathon (it's coming up on March 7th!) and that heart rate monitor (along with the beginner's half marathon training plan from coolrunning.com) have been my new savior. I did a 10 mile run last week, and I wouldn't have been able to come close to that if I were still running so fast.

So, now I'm not that last one to finish anymore. I may never win a trophy for running, but I did win a second place medal at my first 5K...my first ever award for anything physical in my life. And I owe it mostly to technology. Oh, and Robert Ullrey.

Gmail protects me from myself

The lists of common-sense things to do to protect your computer have been around for years: choose a secure password, don't download suspicious software, constantly run and update virus protection, protect yourself from spy ware.

Despite knowing this advice, I haven't always followed it. Sometimes I download stuff that I haven't checked thoroughly, or I have a simple password to access things I don't use very often. And, for all of my online life I haven't had a problem. Until recently.

Somehow my email was compromised and everyone on my contact list was sent a link to some strange Russian porn site.

That should be the end of it...now my email is done for, and I've got to come up with another address to use. But no...Google sniffed out the problem and did a few clever things to help protect me.

First, they noticed the account was sending out a lot of messages, and stopped the account from being able to send anything out. Then, in order for me to log in again, I had to jump through a lot of hoops (asking questions about what I put down as my personal information) then sent a text message to the number I had listed as my phone number and made me enter it in.

Then, once I had regained access they encouraged me to set up 2-step access. I've always been interested in information security, and the nerdy things smart people can do to keep information safe. The US intelligence agencies use special rooms called SCIFs (pronounced skiffs) to discuss classified information and have specially configured blackberries that allow for access to classified email systems. Google, of course, can't reconfigure the equipment we use, but they can take

advantage of the equipment we have.

Once you're forced to change your password, Google asks you input information about your phone, and if it's a blackberry, iPhone

or other certain smart phones it encourages you to download a program that generates a random 6 digit number every minute.

To configure the program, you take a picture of a QR code (like the one shown to the right) with your phone, and the software translates the image into the information it needs to assign the random numbers to your specific account.

Then, once your phone is configured, you need to enter the 6 digit code the first time you log in to your account. Google recognizes the computers you use on a regular basis, and only makes you put in the code about once a month once it's configured.

Then in a final turn of brilliance, they find 2 ways to help you access your email should you phone go missing. First they ask for a backup number they could send the access information to (as a text message or even a voice mail) and then they employ a form of encryption developed almost a hundred years ago: the one time pad.

US intelligence agencies needed a way to communicate secret information, and a guy named Gilbert who worked for AT&T had the idea of using a randomly generated series of numbers to encrypt messages. The sender would have a list of numbers on a small pad of paper and would shift each letter down the alphabet a number of places. The recipient would have the same list of numbers, and could decipher the message by undoing the change the sender made. After each message, you destroy the page you used and sue the next list of numbers for the next message.

Since the only two people who know how many positions each letter was shifted, and the number is random each time it's virtually impossible to crack. Google takes advantage of this, and as a last resort, if you lose access to your account you are given a list of 10 numbers you are supposed to keep in your wallet. If you don't have you phone, and the other techniques don't work, you use this one time pad to get back in to your account. Clever right?

I'm relieved the geniuses at Google protected me from my, well, dunceness.