Marathon – GPS Trainer Released

We’ve gone through a bunch of apps in the past that assist runners/bikers (here and here and here’s another one) but there’s a new kid on the block, and it has a nice addition to it – verbal stat announcements to keep you motivated. It’s called Marathon and it’s the work of Ooije of XDA and it has its own dedicated site as well. It has a pretty nice feature list:

• Announce various statistics in the headset or speaker while running.
• Compete with yourself by using a previous recording or a generic time based goal.
• Records data such as time, distance, speed, altitude change.
• Can show a graph over your speed/altitude as well as a map of the track.
• Upload the result to www.marathon-mobile.net to see more detailed info and compare your results with others. The webpage is still a work in progress, so don’t expect too much yet.

It’s very simple to use too. Just launch it and configure the settings for whatever announcements you would like (time/distance, current/average speed, distance left and goal comparison). There’s also a dedicated page in the app to tell you how good of a GPS signal you have to verify you can get a good reading. The voices are clear it really adds a nice element to training. Now I’ve only tested it in 20 foot increments (on my balcony:)) but it looked and felt nice and I can rally see it helping in real life use. Knowing your distance without the need to look away from the road is great. I’m really looking forward to using this in a location with a little more room:)