RunKeeper: It’s the Nike+iPod, but free. Oh, and it works on the iPhone.

Some of us need a little push to get exercising. That’s pretty much me. I had the luxury of a fairly athletic childhood, but once the ol’ parental push ended, I kinda stopped working out in any capacity. I needed to find new motivation. Almost nine years since high school, I decided it was time to get myself active again.

What better way than using my beloved gadgets and Macgasm as a motivation.

I found a sweet iPhone app that’ll let me track my activity, and I was ready to hit the bike trails again.

RunKeeper was the perfect tool. It has a bunch of different options for your activities (running, cycling, hiking, skiing, etc) and then maps them out on a google map. It keeps track of your trip information, and it lets you know the speed you’re traveling, the time you’ve been exercising and a nice little bar graph of your energy bursts (No idea what it’s officially called, you can see a screenshot in the gallery below). For the record, the low point on the graph is where I almost barreled over a little girl, luckily I avoided her and the trees. I’m not sure why the high point is so high. I swear, it was not chemically induced.

Joshua is the Content Marketing Manager at BuySellAds. He’s also the founder of Macgasm.net. And since all that doesn’t quite give him enough content to wrangle, he’s also a technology journalist in his spare time, with bylines at PCWorld, Macworld and TechHive.