Two times lucky...

 It didn't work out with the Amsterdam marathon last month. Actually, I new it, already in the summer. There was simply no time for running, I could not prepare on time.

But now, it is time for the second attempt. I'm already registered for Rotterdam Marathon on 14 April 2013. To make it more interesting it is autumn, days are short, it is cold and it rains, as you can imagine it does in The Netherlands, 7 meters below the sea level. And this is the season I'm going to use to prepare for my first marathon. Fingers crossed.

Next thing is the app itself. The development was pretty much frozen since February, but it is going to be restarted soon. There is new website design coming, and new app version shortly after.

New chapter.

It's time for a marathon

I registered for the Amsterdam Marathon in October. Failure is not an option :-)

I found training program and, today, new running shoes arrived (the old ones are wasted after two half marathons and preparation). I have 5 months time now to prepare for my first real marathon. It's going to be epic adventure.

The development of the app goes slowly right now, but I'm still planning to update it from time to time, to be able to share my first marathon live with my own app.
I'm planning to look at the accelarator to be able to measure the distance more accurately, also in case of GPS problems, and some more website improvements to experiment with cool simple designs.

1000km is a fact

Last Sunday we did it. We reached 1000 kms with the iPhone app.

The half marathon in Rotterdam went perfect. Most important, iPhone app worked without any problems.

The test of our first version of the Android app went also ok. We noticed some issues, but with the test results, stable version will be ready soon.

The iPhone app was also used by Hans during Paris marathon. There we noticed something interesting. The long run with locked iPhone in the tunnel, did cause problems with the GPS. Running with any "location aware" app in the background (locked iPhone or app not active) is not recomended, but anyway, we are going to look at this closely now.

Big Sunday

The time has come. In two days we are going to run with liverunn.in in Rotterdam and Paris.

At the same time, we will break 1000km ran with the app, and test the Android app, developed by Quintin, who is going to run the first half of the Rotterdam Marathon.

My personal target is to finish this little 21,09 kms within 2hrs. There is a little chance, not a big one, but still there is a chance :-)

calm... before the storm

So it is true, that the last post on this blog was written more then one month ago, but the running and testing of the app never stopped. We reached today first 100 runs on liverunn.in :-) With some spectacular 35kms done by Hans during his preparation for Paris.

I worked on the fixes and improvements for the iOS version of the app, and tomorrow after my longest run before my half marathon in Rotterdam, it will be submitted to the appstore.

The Android version of liverunn.in is also comming soon. It is tested now and will be released for the Rotterdam Business Duo Marathon, in two weeks.

And there are many interesting things still in the pipeline :-) There are enough ideas, this is for sure :-)

Rotterdam Half Marathon

Yes, it is just 2 months to Rotterdam Half Marathon. I tried to run in the winter as much as possible, now it is time to pick up the right schedule. With today's 5 kms run I start my preparation, my goal is again to complete half marathon in less then 2 hrs time.

Not easy, I have little time to train ( writing this with one hand, my new born daughter sleeps on my left shouder), my condition is poor, times not good, and the new version of the app is still in the pipeline. Sounds like nice challenge isn't it ?

Today 5km with 5'24'' pace. Enough to work on.

January 2012

It's been a while since last post, but there was for sure enough going on in January to write about.

First of all liverunn.in app, new version of lookwhoisrunning has been released in the first week of 2012. After that the app has been tested, mainly by Hans (jammer) who is training for the marathon in Paris in April.

Mostly thanks to his effort, we have just reached 500 kms, and 54 runs in total. Last week Quintin (morpheus) joined us, and started preparation for his runs this year.

liverunn.in team (me + Quintin) will also run Rotterdam Duo Business Marathon, so we should reach 1000 test kilometers pretty soon :-)

There is also no silence on the development front. Two weeks ago new test server has been set up, meaning that the android version is now in development.
New version of the iPhone app with some improvements is being tested now, and should be ready for download in the App Store in the first week of February.

liverunn.in is live

New year, new chapter. Lookwhoisrunning.com has been converted to liverunn.in The app itself is in review right now and should become ready to download within few hours.

App Store

Yes, the app v. 1.2.1 has been accepted today, and is now available in the appstore !

Nice milestone. Hopefully there will be plenty of feedback from users soon.

And now it is time to finish some cool feature for the version 1.3 :-)

Testing

The testing of the app goes further, the counter of the test runs (car, bicycle) shows now 532 kilometers ~10 hours. In other words it simply works.





The app is not yet submitted to the appstore only because of some last extra feature which is going to be implemented this weekend.

The next big thing is New York City Marathon next week. Hans is going to run it with the 1.2 version of the app !

And the app is now also tested by Quintin who ran with it on Wednesday. Remember if you want to test it, just let me know.

Stress Test

After final gps reading test on the bike it is time now for stress tests.

Today I drove more then 130 kms with the app to check last improvements.

All the test runs are hidden and not visible in the statistics (they have also distance set to 0.1 km), but they can be still checked here:

15 km on the bike
45 km in the car
30 km the car
58 km the car

I did it !

Yesterday I ran my first half marathon. It was eye opening experience for me.
The crowd, the atmosphere, perfect weather. First 10 kms went so easy and fast that I haven't even noticed.

The application worked nicely, unfortunately after 12 kms there was a problem with a network, as a result, the second half was not available live. Here how it looked like on LookWhoIsRunning - Amsterdam Half Marathon

Hans did another test yesterday, he cycled and compared his "usual running gps device" with lookwhoisrunning app. The app worked nicely, during this test, and proved that the gps readings are accurate enough.

Boris did send me some feedback too. He did some comparison between his usual choice (Nike+) and Run Keeper and took a look at my app in the process.

Now it is time to update the To-do list, implement last improvements, and... run again :-)

2 days to go

The time has come, Today I got my number and a t-shirt. On Sunday I'm going to take on the challenge of the half marathon in Amsterdam. It will be also the final test of my app, before submitting it to the appstore next week.

My plan was not to run anymore before Sunday, but I just finished some work on the app, and will need to test it tomorrow. In other words I will need to run :-)

19 km within 2 hrs

One more milestone in my running adventure. Yesterday 19km in 1h52' much better then week before :-)

There is only one week left to the D day, on Sunday, I'm going to do it my first, half marathon. Amsterdam Sunday 16 October, 13:30. My optimistic target is to complete the distance within 2hrs...

And Hans did run with the app last Saturday half marathon. This is a part of his preparation to the New York Marathon in November.

The app is now in the Release Candidate state, I decided to wait a few days with uploading to the appstore. I'm receiving good feedback from testers, need some time to implement it.

LookHansIsRunning.com

Today officially the first testing runner shared his run on the web, using lookwhoisrunning.com :-)

Testers

Good news. There will be a few people running with the current test version of lookwhoisrunning app :-) I'm looking forward to it.

And there are still places in the ad-hoc distribution certificate so drop me an email if you are also interested :-)

19 km

The site is open and I did 19kms for the first time yesterday. 19kms in full sun, >25 degrees, and with no water... Very poor time, but still quite an achievement.

The app worked well, I got the updates and applause nicely. I have few additional points on my todo list, but no major bugs anymore. I should be able to submit it to the appstore this week.

There will be also one more runner running with the app this week (Quintin I count on you :-) ) Finally a chance to test the other side, the website.

Final push.

My primary target - half marathon run in Amsterdam is just 17 days away. There are still many kilometers to be run to finalize the preparation, and still some features/bugs on the to do list.

Anyway, the current plan is to open the website this weekend and hopefully run 19km with some "social applause" on Sunday :-) The early version of the app should be appstore ready soon and submitted for the apple approval next week.

Test Test

First post.