December 21, 2008

Why I use dailymile

Dailymile is a social training site. You can find it at http://www.dailymile.com and @dailymile on Twitter.

I don’t know how I found this site, but apparently, we crossed paths not long after it launched its private beta. I had recently begun working with a personal trainer in an effort to get back into shape. I missed the sensation of running fast, and I wasn’t strong enough to run fast at all. I could barely run slowly and felt pathetic.

Dailymile originally served as a workout journal for me. I included just about all the details of all my workouts. It became a good habit to recall what I did each day and to document it. Doing so wrote the details into my long term memory and continues to serve as reference for designing my own workouts.

I slowly accumulated friends on the site. Some were coworkers who were aware of my health kick because I got to the office exhausted and famished every day. I invited them to the site, and some began using it regularly along with me. Others were complete strangers who just decided they wanted to follow my training. Dailymile etiquette is different from other social platforms I’m familiar with. People tend to be more narrow in what they share, but more generous in their dispensation of kudos and motivation.

A couple of months after I started with all this, the dailymile development team added a Twitter integration feature. (I’d also like to mention that these guys have been great — directly involved in the dailymile community and responsive to members’ feature requests and defect reporting. They are @lostinpatterns and @korevec on Twitter.) I reluctantly connected dailymile to Twitter. Although Twitter culture had been very eclectic and tolerant to date, I imagined that my followers there would become annoyed from seeing my daily exercise routine. Boy, was I wrong! I got only positive feedback and a slow trickle of request for dailymile invitations. 

Now when I post a workout on dailymile, it cross-posts the first 140 characters to Twitter, including a particular syntax that has since become a meme in a swath of the Twitter community. Example: “Ran [5] miles in [42] minutes and felt [great].” 

Lately, about a dozen close friends follow my training through some social medium, and I follow theirs. Many have told me that my posts inspire them, so I am even more motivated to stay on track. Because people are watching and waiting, I feel like a time keeper. My experience with my training has evolved from something I do for myself into something I do for my community. A year ago I had no concept that I could be part of this sort of community, and I certainly had no sense of the impact each of the members could have on each other.

I now plan to train for a half marathon, and I’ll explore the possibility of training for a triathlon. I haven’t ridden a bike in 11 years, and I haven’t swum laps in about 8 years. With a community of experts and motivators around me, and I know that if I want to make this kind of commitment, that they’ll help me get there.