Tasty Tangerine

I love my iPod. I've had several. The one I treasure most at the moment is my iPod Nano (first-gen), because it's the one that works with the nike+iPod system. (mine is actually an ASICS+iPod system, but that's another story. Moral of the story, don't be afraid of a seam ripper, and don't be afraid to hack your footwear).

This hasn't really revolutionized the way that I run (you put one foot in front of the other... repeat until done), but it has certainly changed it. Having access to my pace, how long I've run, and the distance is really useful and motivating - is my pace better than it was last time I hit this part of my run? Am I going to get home faster than the last time I did this run? It's kind of replaced my heart rate monitor, and it doesn't chafe.

One of the problems has been figuring out which songs are good for running. This is harder than you'd think; it's easy to think of a bunch of songs that are at a good pace and strong beat, but they get tedious after awhile. I need a lot of variety in my playlists. I'd been thinking of writing an app that could analyze my MP3s to calculate beat-per-minute stats, and then build playlists off of that.

Someone beat me to it, and did it better than I would have been able to.

Tangerine is a very iTunes-like app with two purposes in life:

• Calculate BPM stats for your music library (only non-DRM files, unfortunately), and
  
• Generate playlists with songs that match a given BPM shape over the course of the playlist.
  

This thing is full of tasty goodness for making playlists for running or otherwise working out. Say you're going to go out and do a 10 mile run, which for me means about an hour and 45 minutes. You fire up Tangerine, tell it you want to make a new playlist that's an hour and 45 minutes long, choose the tempo shape you want (there are four selections), define the BPM range for the songs, and then save the playlist. Tweak it in iTunes afterwards, and then... Sync and go.

It can save the BPM numbers to your MP3s directly, or it can keep them in a separate database if you prefer. Of course, if they're in a separate database, then iTunes doesn't know how to get at them.

Highly recommended. Autumn & Bill, go get it!

TC 10 Miler

Had a mediocre run sunday morning. 1:41:54, for a 10:29 pace. This is in painful contrast to the Bjorklund, where I was able to do a 9:46 pace for 13.1 miles, not just 10, or last year's TC10M, where I finished in 1:37:21, at a 9:45 pace. Blech. In my defense, about all I can offer is that I had a fever of 104 on friday afternoon, and nearly didn't do the race at all. I was not prepared for a good showing this time out; I'm frankly pleased that I finished at all.

And yeah, Abby Heglund smoked me by over 5 minutes, unlike last year. Congrats on a good race, Abby.

I look forward to next year's race - hope I get in!