I am standing on the starting line of the 2011 NYC Marathon on Staten Island. I am unprepared. I'm nervous. In fact, 17 hours ago I didn't know I was running this race. Oops. How did this come about? A convergence of factors-including technology, phone calls, client engagements, mobile communications and a fortuitous travel schedule. If you were a little New Age, you might call it synchronicity; if you like Gwyneth Paltrow, maybe you'd call it ‘Sliding Doors'. If you didn't like running, you might call it idiocy. It is a beautiful day in NYC, and I am off for a 26.2-mile jog. And I know the last 26 miles will be a challenge.
In 2011, I had begun mapping my runs via this iPhone application. So it can tell me that in 2011, I had run 178 kilometres, spread over 16 runs, that I had burnt 16 402 calories, and that my average speed had been 4:59 minutes per kilometre. I didn't grow up numeric. I do love analysis, patterns and trends though. Nike+ had become my digitised self. A digital mirror on my analogue life. Every step you take, every move you make, every breath you make, the digital world will be watching you, Anders. I know-this sounds very Sting (or even 1984 Orwellian), but to me, Nike+ was one of the earliest examples of the convergence of the digital and the analogue. And it was going to help me to run the NYC Marathon.
Analogue sweat, digital analysis. Digilogue. A combination of military GPS technology, Google Maps, iPhone sensors, and Nike digilogue ingenuity enabled Nike+, not another human being, to be my greatest supporter on this run. Yes, of course, there was the atmosphere-the four rows of humans screaming, shouting and playing music all through Brooklyn's diverse neighbourhoods. The ‘New York, New York' by Sinatra at Staten Island. The oil drums in Harlem. The excitement of the Central Park finish. But it was the pre-recorded cheers from Dirk Nowitzki , the thumbs up encouragement via Facebook, and the timing and analysis from that little iPhone app that really got me through. It provided me hindsight, insight and foresight of how I'd done, was doing and should do, what I needed to eat during the race, and whether I was meeting my targets.
In 2005, my brother Gustaf and I ran the Sydney Marathon. Yes, we wore iPods and had music. But the main analogue push of encouragement came from running together, side by side. We had set a target and we missed it-partly because we didn't really know how we were tracking. In six fast years, the technology had changed, and digital equipment previously reserved for elite sports teams and individuals had become an affordable consumer technology, enabling an amateur runner like me to compete in the NYC marathon-and finish the race eight minutes faster, and with less training, than a race over the same distance six years prior. While I wish I could have experienced the marathon with my brother, this digital and analogue convergence signified something even bigger. The digitised self-the way we are now quantifying and digitising our analogue behaviours.
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