Jill Will Run

Have you seen the Nike+ FuelBand? If you haven’t, here’s a video that kind of explains what it is:

If you don’t want to watch the 30 second video, the basic gist is that it’s a wristband you wear that records your activity so that you earn “Nike Fuel.” If you wave at your neighbor, your Fuel points go up. If you exercise, your Fuel points go up even faster.

What’s Nike Fuel?

Good question!  Apparently it is some metric that Nike has invented to track your activity.  So where we as runners may be used to tracking our runs in distance, pace, time, etc. or those who care about this might track it in terms of calories… Nike wants us to track it in terms of Nike Fuel.

Apparently I’m not the only one that thinks the made-up measurement is kind of silly.  Wired: Hands-On with Nike+ FuelBand Exercise Monitor

But that has inspired me to invent my own metric.  I’m going to call it the JOW!  (Those are my initials… I kind of like my initials, it’s like a word.  Especially if you add an exclamation point!)

With my metric, you don’t burn it like you do with calories, you earn it like you do with Nike Fuel.  And I can be just as arbitrary!

• I can award myself 10 JOW! points for each mile I’ve run.
• Unless I’m really tired. Then I get 25 JOW! points just for making an effort.
• Being pregnant automatically earns me 1000 JOW! points just for waking up each day.
• Playing tug-of-war with Jade The Boxer earns JOW! points, but it changes depending on which toy you are using.  A rope is easier to hold on to than the orange plastic-y toy, thus the orange toy gets more points.
• I’m going to give myself JOW! points for eating… anything. Seriously, I’m a recovering anorexic, so I should be rewarded for eating.
• Sneezing earns JOW! points. Just because I do that daily, may as well get some kind of reward from it.
• JOW! points can be taken away for saying something self-deprecating.
• Rolling your eyes at co-workers over the phone when they say dumb things earns JOW! points, but rolling your eyes at co-workers when you’re on a Skype video call with them ends up in points being taken away.

I’m sure there are countless other ways I could reward myself with JOW! points.  Now I just need a groovy little wristband that communicates with my iPhone and automatically tells me how many JOW! points I’ve earned each day.

If Nike can invent their own measurement, any of us can.  Go ahead, make your own point system… it’s kind of entertaining, if not a mildly silly way to occupy some blog space.

This is sarcasm… if you couldn’t tell. I’m not really going to spend all day giving myself these points, because that would be overly time-consuming. When this was very first released I posted it on my Facebook Page and asked if people were interested in it, those that replied seemed uninterested in this gadget.