Today’s guest post is by my friend Brian, who’s lost almost a hundred pounds in the last year. He didn’t do it by sitting on his butt, and he didn’t do it with low-tech toys like your mom’s pedometer.  Aside from a metric shitload of determination and first-rate personal training, here’s the gear he used to help him go from struggling through a walk, to running over thirty miles a week.

Eli was good enough to do a guest post on my blog, so I’m returning the favor.  On my blog, he talked a bit about his motivations and his own story with regard to fitness, so it seems only appropriate for his that I do a piece talking about some of the gadgets and gear I’ve used.  Moving right along, here goes:

Timex Ironman 30 Lap watch with heart rate monitor

This was the very first thing I went out and got.  First goal was at least 30 minutes of cardio a day.  It’s not the fanciest model out there, but it’s gotten the job done pretty nicely and I’ve only had to replace the batteries on the heart rate band once.

iPhone 3G/3GS

Top notch tool.  I’ll be breaking down the apps shortly, but just the iPhone itself was a pretty key tool for looking up hard to find calorie counts on the spot.  Before I found Lose It!, I was using the notepad function to record all of my calorie intake and Safari to look up calorie counts on the web.  Last month, my early upgrade came up and I put down some dollars to go from an iPhone 3GS.  Money well spent for the extra capacity and better battery life.

Runkeeper Pro

This app is a godsend and the dev team is active and creative.  These days, it’ll track your run by GPS (let the GPS lock during your warmup before starting the activity), give you on the spot info, post your runs to Facebook and Twitter, and, as a modestly priced paid service called Runkeeper Reports, which give all kinds of graphs and analyses of different aspects of your data.  They even recently added a calorie counter, which appears to not just take into account distance, weight, age and gender, but also elevation, which is key around Seattle.  Flat long distance runs don’t really exist here.

Lose It!

Tracks intake and exercise, gives you a good idea of what your consumption should be, has a tremendous included library of foods already and you can save not only custom items, but recipes, which are accumulated by all the ingredients and then split into your choice of serving size.  Also offers a website that it syncs with, like Runkeeper, and the analyses it offers are free.

Food Scale

If you’re going to lose weight and get in shape, it’s not just going to be through exercise alone.  Measuring cups are vital, but density varies, so a good accurate digital food scale is your key in the kitchen for caloric accuracy.

Road Runner Sports 9” Velocity Compression Shorts

These are great. Compression shorts are designed to reduce muscle fatigue with compression, and fit snugly, reducing or eliminating friction and/or chafing. When temperatures allow (generally about 40 degrees Fahrenheit for me), I run in Velocity Compression Shorts; they’re about the comfiest thing I’ve ever run in. They also make them built into more traditional running or multisport shorts, should you require a little more modesty. During the winter, I’ll go with a full base layer of running tights, to similar effect.

Archmolds Custom Shoe Insoles

These are pretty awesome tech, actually.  You stick them in the oven for a bit, slip them into your shoe and stand in them.  After they set, they’re customized to your feet.  They’re very supportive and super comfy, which is important for long distance running.

Aside from that, I’m decidedly low tech.  A set of dumbbells and an exercise ball for resistance training, a good set of running shoes, and a healthy variety of technical material running clothes. Because I’d rather run in the cold rain than on a treadmill indoors.  Gadgets are great tools, but raw determination and consistency has been doing it for countless ages prior.