To be honest, it was as much a crusade as anything else. But, looking back at it, no programmer who wasn’t also the founder of the company, would ever have been given the latitude to sink so many hours into this project. And, for some device/software version combinations, the data should be pretty good now. What you see on Smashrun, I think, is the best that can be done. And the bits on the graph where it’s green don’t always match the places where you ran fast. And if you calculate the distance based on the GPS points, it won’t match the distance you’ve been given for that run. But, no… those splits can’t be backed out of the raw data.
Yes, there’s a map that shows pretty much where you ran. Yes, the graph goes up and the graph goes down, and indeed, it does change colors. From the 1,000 foot view that Nike’s site gives you, everything appears to be in order. Once there he hands it to the first person he finds who happens to have this terrible cold, and they uncrumple the soaking wet fax, with it’s smeared ink, and they read it in their thick Scottish brogue over a bad Skype connection to someone who’s hard of hearing. Someone picks up the printout, stuffs it in their pocket and carries it through a rainstorm to the nearest pub. In short, it was a fool’s errand, the deepest and darkest morass.Īfter spending a month in the weeds, building a matrix of kludges based on the different versions and sources, I can only describe the way the data is stored like this… Imagine you wrote a love poem, and faxed it to a machine running out of ink, somewhere in Glasgow. And, of course, these sources have also changed historically as old bugs were fixed, and new ones were introduced. This means that each source must be handled differently. Each of these sources have unique data signatures – the data is registered in the same fields but with different meanings.
There are currently dozens of different sources for the runs that end up on Nike’s site: the watch, the footpod, the iPhone and Android apps, runs sent from Tom Tom, runs sent from Garmin, the Apple Watch, and even connected treadmills. I invested an embarrassing amount of time in the task. So, I rolled up my sleeves and attacked the issue wholeheartedly. It pained me to see the frequent problems and errors. We have a fair number of Nike users on Smashrun and, for many people, the data we’ve retrieved has become the sole existing record of those runs. This turn of events is all the more painful because I’ve just spent over a month working to make the Nike import bulletproof. We’re not an official partner of Nike, and so we don’t have any recourse, but to wait and hope that they fix something.
As of Sept 28th, new runs are no longer flowing through the pathways we use to retrieve your data.