The debacle continues…

So I went to the gym, still a little tired from Thursday’s 13K run with the aim of going one better and, better still, recording this one correctly on Nike+ using the iPod nano. So naive, so very, very naive.

The running part was quite easy. I rain a nice easy 12K. I checked periodically to make sure that the Nike+ application was actually working and was relieved, at each opportunity, to find out that it was keeping up with me this time.

I ran home, turned on the computer, started iTunes and connected the iPod… Nothing happened. Ordinarily there would be a message along the lines of “retrieving log in information fro Nike+”. Nothing. I checked the website and logged in. The last run recorded (due to the nonsense that happened the other day when I didn’t wear Nike+ shoes, was the 12th August. I had just run 12K today.

So I followed my own notes on enabling the iPod as a drive and looked at the empeds folder. This is where the past runs and the synced runs are kept. There is also a LastWorkout file and a preferences file in the root directory. The lastWorkout file is the file containing today’s workout and there is a copy of it in the last run folder. All runs that have been synced are in the synced folder. All files are XML.

My logic was this. I would ensure that the file in the last run folder was todays. And it was. I would then ensure that the LastWorkout file is the same file. And that the preferences file, that contains a summary includes this workout too.

This last file is a pain in the ass as it contained summary data of all 22 synced runs to date.

Deleting files?

This is where it gets messy. I checked all the files and their contents as above but nothing made a blind bit of difference. @NikeSupport was as unhelpful as ever and even stopped responding. So my logic switched to the following:

If the application is supposed to look in the LastRun folder and upload it and ignore the synced folder (as it has already been uploaded) then I could delete all the synced files, and then make the summary file just include the single run. Brilliant!

No. That didn’t work.

XML?

I even hacked about a bit in XMl to make it work. I removed anything I didn’t like the look of. To no avail.

Restore and reload.

I then got a-thinking and decided to Restore my iPod AFTER backing up all songs from it onto the laptop, and copying the LastRun file onto my PC. I did this then restored the device. This blanks it, all music, all apps, everything. You then need to reload all the music and plug in the Nike+ receiver. This enables Nike+ on the pod again with no runs.

I then did a 1 second, no distance, no pace run to create the folder structure on the iPod. I then copied the LastRun file form my PC and ovewrote the blank files on the iPod and plugged it in and…

And…

HOLY SHIT ON A BAGEL it worked! iTunes took the file, Nike+ uploaded and I was mighty relieved, not just because Nike+ is a good app and it is my greatest motivator.

The iPhone to the rescue

The next thing was to, now paranoid about the stability of my Nike+ iPod combo, I downloaded the Nike+ running app for my iPhone. This could be used as an alternative. And I was amazed, when I logged on to see that 1. it downloaded all my stats from the website and 2. it had the elusive 10K PB on there – 56:06.

Where did my mile PB go?

Now this was great. The phone stores the data like this.

While the website shows it like this.