I was playing around with the motion-x app today with the iphone and google earth and found it was possible to get a pretty good view of your instantaneous speed as well as track...

Some of you probably do this all the time, but it was a new one for me. If you don't know how, here's the steps (on a windows computer, mac is probably similar):

On your iphone:
- startup motion-x and start recording a track
- when finished, save track and 'share' it to your email address
On your computer:
- open your email message that motion-x sends
- click view on map link
- a web page will open with your track
- click the download GPX button and save the file somewhere
- Open up google earth
- click file/open then change the filetype to GPS and find your file
- this should then show the track in google earth.
- on the left hand side you should see the name of your track ("GPS Device")
- right click it and 'show elevation profile'
- a time-slider will appear that you can move from start to finish and show speed/altitude/dist travelled etc.

Seems like a lot of steps, but it's a quick and easy way to view your track. The screenshot is from today's short and lazy downwinder... better winds forecast for tomorrow

Bleachy said..

I find if you can take your iPhone with you then using an app like "MapMyRun" or "strava" work really well and can give you a lot better info. I use MapMyRun and it gives distance, time, pace, speed and even custom split times. I also have a heart rate monitor connected so I can see all of that detail after my workouts. You can download it for free which works really well or get an upgraded version at extra cost, very worth it if you like getting all of that info.

Motion X, can do all that also including HR if you have a compatible HR monitor strap. It also has a large number of activities including SUP, which last time I looked MapMyFitness didn't have.

Bleachy - thanks, I've downloaded mapmyrun and will compare. I agree, there's lots of products out there that will do similar.
Nosaj - I use liveupdates too. Virtually all my long paddles are solo.

Isnt the tech just awesome these days, it would have been less than 10 years ago that you just couldn't have got any of this information without shelling out huge amounts of money and the actual device would have needed a back pack. Then with all the waterproof kit you can get to lock your smart phone away its brilliant. The only thing I found with Motion X was that it just couldn't find enough satellites when I was out paddling. I ended up getting a Garmin watch and they are just brilliant, plus you get the whole Garmin Connect site which is bloody brilliant as well.