For the past several years I was a card-carrying member of the Blackberry Brigade until Verizon finally broke through the AT&T stronghold and picked up the iPhone. Like many I immediately became a convert (and I'm not alone considering RIM just layed off 1500 workers). Needless to say I'm a bit behind on the world of apps but am catching up very quickly. Recently I've become a huge fan of MapMyFitness, a collection of tools for mapping your fitness whether it's individual workouts, walking, hiking, biking, etc. The app uses location to track your exact route, time and distance. It then aggregates the data to give you a snapshot of your progress over time.
You quickly find out some pretty interesting things. For example I now know that to push mow my lawn I have to walk about 4 miles, which tells me I either need to get a smaller yard or buy a rider. I also found out that my walk from the train to my office in Minneapolis is 1.2 miles--- not bad twice per day. If you make an effort to turn on the app every time you go for a walk you'd be amazed how much ground you actually cover.
With recent studies (via Men's Journal) showing that as little as forty minutes of walking daily can boost memory and even regenerate shrinking brain tissue, it's important to get that daily walk in. With walking being harder to quantify than running a certain number of miles on the treadmill or doing reps at the gym it's nice to have a handy app to track the distance you covered.
Most importantly you get real data in that endless quest to quantify and track your fitness efforts, and if you're a real Ironman you can even post your workouts to Twitter and Facebook.
Here's a great interview via Mixergy with co-founder Robin Thurston
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