The rise of the modern day Smartphone has revolutionized the running world. A few years ago the only thing available to record your training sessions were expensive, cumbersome GPS watches which cost the earth and often provided to be less than accurate. Although GPS running watches have vastly improved over the past few years with the entrance of new players such as the TomTom Runner and the Soleus GPS watch, they are still expensive. A growing amount of runners are now ditching their watches in favor of free Apple and Android apps that record all of their essential statistics but for zero cost.
So with so many different apps to choose from, how do you know which are the best? Check out our top three below
Nike+
The Nike+ app is by far the market leader when it comes to recording your essential running stats. As well as recording things like speed, distance, pace and time the app will also couch you through your headphones to let you know if you are running too fast, too slow or have broken a personal best.
Using the app you can also upload your live runs to Facebook to let your friends know that you are out on a run. When they click like’ on your post this gets translated into a cheer sound through your headphones when you are running, motivating you to run further and faster!
Social features aside, the Nike+ app also offers a very graphical and feature rich online training portal where you can upload and store all of your training sessions.
Moves
Although this isn’t a running specific app, the Moves app is revolutionizing the fitness industry and so is well worth a mention.
The Moves app allows you to record all of your runs, cycles, walks and steps throughout your day. It runs in the background of your phone and aims to record each and every one of your moves so that you can build up a picture of how healthy your lifestyle is.
Although it only allows you to record time and distance for an individual training session, what this app is great at doing is allowing you to identify danger points in your daily and weekly routine where you don’t do as much exercise as you should. For me, it made me realize how much time I spend doing zero movement at work!
Endomondo
Endomondo is one of the most feature rich running apps out there. Although it lacks the ease of use and some of the online features of the Nike+ app is more than makes up for this with its extra phone based features. As well as tracking your speed, distance, time and pace you can also see your heart rate and cadence, making this much more suited to the multi sporter. You can even track the weather!
So those are some of the best running apps on the market. Although there are still some advantages to be had with a standalone GPS running watch such as a TomTom watch, Garmin Forerunner or a Nike+ SportWatch GPS, the fact that these apps are free to own and use more than makes up for their lower battery life and slightly smaller feature list.
