Interesting story in the NYT style section about the value of heart rate monitors. Their conclusion? Hard to say -- other than maybe not as important as people say. My running partner brother had a post up recently that looked at something similar, the need to know what data you really need to track. As I was running the other day, wearing a heart rate monitor, looking at a GPS map on my phone and playing music from my phone to my bluetooth headset, I was swimming in data up until I got a phone call and almost ran into a tree...true story. But man, I was data rich.
My POV on heart rate monitors? Super helpful. Lesson for my professional life? Knowing what you want to measure *before* embarking on a communications approach is a really, really good idea. Anyone can run a campaign -- new media or old -- and then retrofit measurement to ensure the campaign was successful. What's way harder, especially with all the new tools out there, it to declare in advance what measurement will look like.
Seriously, the problem we have today is not a paucity of tools, it is a surplus. And because we can do more things, the urge of course is to do more things. Having said up front what success looks like allows us a shield to prevent potentially random time consumer behaviors that might be better spent elsewhere.
Oh, my max heart rate is 183, determined by running a mile warm up at the local track and then a 1.5 mile speed work out, with the last quarter mile being all out effort. Bring it on, Gina Kolata.