On track with Ski Tracks - Morwen Williams
Saturday February 26, 2011 - Email this article to a friend

In the ski world, you can't buy much for 59p. But never has so little been spent for so much reward as on my latest iphone app, Ski Tracks.

Knowing that there were apps for running and cycling to track your speed, route and distance, I figured some clever people out there MUST have developed a ski one.

It took a while to find - search for "ski" in the Appstore and you get a lot of games! 

But perseverance paid off, and for the tiny price of 59p  I was rewarded with SkiTracks.

There's even a SkiTracks Lite version for free.

Using satellite technology, you can track your route on your iphone, and it will tell you lots of lovely statistics.  Like how far you've skied - and how many lifts you took; your maximum altitude, degree of slope and very best of all, your maximum and average speeds.

Data, data and more dataIt just uses GPS - so doesn't need a phone signal.

Now call me a speed junkie or even a gadget freak, but I got quite hooked on this.

For a middle aged mother of two to find out she can hit 55mph (80km/h) in the Bellvarde at Val D'Isere, then there is something very uplifting.

It makes you compete against yourself, to try the run again and again to hit a high.

My friends even asked at the end of each run to check out how we'd done. 

Before I'm accused of being a danger, it was on a very wide, safe green run, and I avoided small children at all costs.

The other non-essential but fun element of SkiTracks is that as it plots your route - showing runs and lifts alike -if you take a photo, it inserts it into the route at the place where it was taken.

And it has charts of altitude and speed, which you can put your finger on at any point to show you exactly what you were doing at what stage in your day. So a full tour of your day to brag about in the bar afterwards!

This gismo isn't a sat nav though.

SkiTracks have a warning on the front page that it shouldn't be used for navigation purposes - I suppose they have to cover themselves in case some off- course bod tries to sue them!

The downside is of course that all this takes up battery life on your phone, but there is a built in warning you can set to your own level to flash when your battery has hit a certain minimum.

If you can't recharge at lunchtime, then it's probably only worth doing for the morning, unless you're skiing with someone else who has a charged phone.

And the other downside is you'll become hooked.

Nicely, not too nurdy - I hope!

For the spirit of the mountains

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