Amongst all the horse racing today, that Japan obviously excels at, I received delivery of a Nike+ iPod Kit.

I’ve been waiting for this since their announcement at the beginning of the year. I tried to grab one when I was last in the US, but I missed it’s availability by a week.

Now I love running, but I lack motivation, and there is no better way than convincing me to slap on the (almost rotted) running shoes by providing a gadget, and an online community–two of my favourite things.

This evening I strapped the transmitter to my old Nike shoe, and headed out with a bunch of motivational tracks on my wife’s iPod Nano. It didn’t take long before I hit my stride and I plugged away for 43 minutes–probably a very stupid decision which I’ll regret for the next few days, given I haven’t run for a few months.

So there are several things that make the Nike+ kit fantastic. Firstly you can track your run while on the road. Having said that, I need to buy a pair of Nike+ shoes, because strapped to the lace it wasn’t registering my pace correctly. I was running at about 5 minute 30 per kilometer, but it lost track and at points wasn’t recording my pace at all.

The second great feature is being able to plug the unit into my Mac when I get home, and it transfers the data of the run to the Nike+ web site. I can then track each run, how I’m progressing each week or month, and even create goals and team challenges. And the user interface is a nice flash site that has all the right round boxes and drop shadows. It even shows my pace through the whole run (you can see from the screen grab that it lost track of me at about 1 km in).

The important feature for me though, is I’m hanging out to run again. There’s nothing more addictive than feeding a database with a bunch of data that I feel compelled to improve.

I’m also looking forward to buying a few PowerSongs or Workouts from the iTunes Music Store.

Anyone else using the Nike+ kit? Maybe we can team up and do a few challenges.