DALLAS — Using Twitter to alert the planet that she’s finished a training run isn’t nerdy or geeky for Libby Jones, past president of the Dallas Running Club.
While some fear that the Internet’s trendy social media could be destroying the framework of social interactions, Jones disagrees. “That’s so ridiculous,” she says. “It’s completely the other way. It’s bringing you together with people you never get to see.”
During her two years as club president, Jones, 30, spent many hours and many miles at White Rock Lake with fellow runners. When her term ended, traveling 45 minutes each way from her home in Allen, Texas, didn’t make as much sense. She began staying connected through dailymile. com, Twitter and her blog.
She kept readers up to date on her running streak of 63 days. Without their encouragement, she says, she would have stopped.
When she became pregnant with her second child and her doctor had some concern about her heart rate, Jones began reporting other workouts, such as Zumba classes, on Facebook.
The days Blanca Gonzales doesn’t log onto dailymile.com and record her runs, she hears from people who read her updates on Facebook regularly.
“Where’s your workout?” they ask. “Where’s your report?”
“It motivates me to go out and do it,” says Gonzales, 46, who lives in Arlington, Texas. “When I don’t feel like working out, I see friends online who did, and I say, ‘I should be able to do that.’”
After earning his master’s in business administration in 2003, Tommy Johnson had time to ride his bike. He went online in search of races and found beginnertriathlete.com. Next thing he knew, he was connecting with strangers, recording his workouts and doing seven to 10 triathlons a year.It has even led him into coaching for Texas Triple Threat, a triathlon training club.
In these days of social networking, sharing means telling more than one friend at work about your good workout. You can register for any number of websites, usually at no cost for the basic level, or just update your friends on Facebook or Twitter. You can use the Nike+, which goes into your shoe and, through your iPod, tracks your pace, distance, time and calories burned. Later, you share the information online.
“It’s been so good for me,” Jones says. “If I put that elliptical workout or Zumba class, I might get feedback or ideas for another workout.”
A time or two, she admits, she has posted her workout before she actually did it. That way, she knew she’d have to follow through.
“It’s the ultimate accountability,” Jones says. “You’ve published it, and you can’t lie.”
Gonzales uses her account on dailymile.com to keep track of her workouts, as well as to see what friends across the country are doing with theirs.
“I have a friend from Oklahoma who’s running a marathon in Michigan or Minnesota,” says Gonzales, mother of three sons. “We comment on each other’s workouts. I have about 20 friends on it, and we push each other. A couple of them will say, ‘You’re doing good, but you need to do this. ’” ...
She found out about the site by reading friends’ posts on Facebook.
“It’s free, that’s the cool thing,” Gonzales says. “You can do biking, running, whatever, and it keeps track of your miles and tells you how many calories you burn.”
As of early June, it told her that in 87 workouts totaling 106.33 hours, she had run 749.74 miles - enough to burn 408.15 doughnuts and power 1,473 television sets.
When Johnson was training for the Ironman Louisville in Kentucky last August, he was corresponding on beginnertriathlete.com with a variety of fellow participants. One decided to order T-shirts so everyone in the group would recognize one another.
“We got to the athletes’ dinner before the race, and we all have these fluorescent, limegreen T-shirts,” says Johnson, 49. “About 20 of us showed up, and we all sat together.”
Without social networking, he says, he would never have met many of the people who are in his life these days.
“The first Beginner Triathlete person I met was at a race in Lubbock,” Johnson says. “We didn’t arrange to meet, but I saw her bike rack and her standing by it. I must have seen a picture of her online, so I went up and started talking.”
Turns out she’s in the U.S.Air Force and often posts from Iraq. Other U.S. troops do so as well, then follow through with reports stateside of the triathlons for which they were training while overseas.
“Pretty inspiring,” Johnson says. “So are others: People who’ve lost 100 pounds and are doing their first triathlon, or others who trained all year but didn’t finish. They say, ‘I’ll be back next year.’”
ActiveStyle, Pages 30 on 07/26/2010