Turn your regular workout into a thrilling race
If you seek additional excitement during your everyday workouts, or lack the inspiration to even get started, now you can compete with yourself, or challenge others, with web based Softrace on your Android smartphone. With Softrace mapping your movements and performances – a variety of data such as time, distance and location is recorded with the phone's GPS. Your daily bike ride to and from work becomes a contest in which past performances are simulated and can be viewed as opponents on screen enabling you to keep constant track of your own position in the race. Softrace is like a multi-player computer game, with the difference that you are not controlling the players – you are one of the players.
Softrace is a GPS based sports tracker and racing application that enables you to compete in various motion based sports, such as running, cycling and skiing. You can challenge someone on a custom race track or simply go anywhere – in any direction – and compete on time at a given distance. The program, and its built in training diary, is adapted for a variety of sports such as cycling, running, kayaking and skiing. It allows those who engage in multiple sports to collect all statistics on the same app. Softrace was one of ten winners of the 2008 Android Developer Challenge. The contest was set out by Google in order to develop new applications for Android. Softrace is the brainchild of Staffan and Thomas Kjellberg and initiated by the brothers' own interest in sport. “We commute by bike and wanted to make it a bit more exciting. Competitive elements make you work harder and gives you the rewarding feeling when reaching set goals”, says Staffan Kjellberg. “And most importantly, it is fun. When I’m out running I get extra motivation by competing against several people, to me unknown, who have run the distance or path before. Theoretically, if I am in New York, I can run the NY Marathon route and compete against last years best performance, given it has been recorded with Softrace", says Thomas Kjellberg.
Once you have downloaded Softrace, most things happen automatically. With the mobile's GPS, the track you run is recorded and displayed in real time on Google Maps. Apart from the main feature, Softrace offers three further functions.
The first is Challenge, where you compete against yourself or others on a predetermined path. The track is made up of virtual controls, created by yourself or other Softrace users. Previously recorded times are your opponents whose progress you see in relation to your own, in real time.
The second feature is Racing. With this feature you can race anywhere, on a given distance. Choose to compete against men, women or mixed and take on fast, medium or slower opponents. Or simply choose your toughest opponent – yourself.
The third feature is Practice. The aim with Practice is to make exercise more fun by tracking your work out and to collect data such as time, average speed, speed, and distance. All this information is collected in your training diary. The same functionality lays the foundation for both Challenge and Racing.
