As some people might know I’ve been using Nike+ to track my dog walks for over 4 months now. With the bad weather, work and the normal route being crowded with idiots tourists this summer the walks have been shorters, but today we hit 500km.

The Nike+ sensor was initially just a weird gadget I bought since it was cheap and I had the touch 2G (so only needed the sensor) but quickly turned into a very nice accessory that went into daily using walking my dog, Kismo. It’s fun seeing how far you’ve gone and seeing the total distance walked slowly growing each day. The milestones are particularly fun to hit, and while every 100km is a nice milestone 500km is a really big one.

The total time spent is 125 hours, over the about 130 days since we started doing this. That’s about an hour each day, which again is about 4km. Some days have been longer, with the longest walks being about 10km, with some days being shorter. The crappy weather this summer and being tired from work has meant shorter trips and we’ve also temporarily lost our old 6.5km walk to idiots (aka tourists), but we’ve managed to find a new route that includes a bit of forest, mostly deserted roads, and more flexibility in length (from 3.7 km and up as far as we want to go).

The reasons for these walks are multiple. Staying somewhat fit is of course nice, and of course a dog needs excercise as well, but I find that getting away from the chair for an hour to listen to a podcast or audio book and enjoy the otuside for a while is the main reason I bother. For the last two months though I have been working my summer job at the Norwegian Road Museum which mostly involves being outside for 6 hours a day, 6 days a week with cycling to and from work, but try explaining “my feet are tired” to a way-too-cute 1.5 year old German Shepherd/Alaskam Malamut mix who’s been more or less trained to expect a walk every day. Besides I have plenty of time to sit on my ass after our walk, and at least then I won’t be bothered with a increasingly sad looking dog face staring at me for the rest of the evening.

Hopefully we’ll hit a few more milestones before winter really sets in and blocks most our routes, though there will be a long time until there’s another one like this. I really recommend the Nike+ sensor to anyone who has a 2G touch or iPhone 3GS as it’s a great little fun device even if you like walking instead of running.