Ironman Hawaii

Come say Hi at the Ironman Expo this week

Congratulations to everyone who qualified for the race. It is always inspirational to watch the Ironman and cheer for everyone who chases the Ironman dream. I am proud to work at TrainingPeaks where we have hudreds of athletes participating in the big event.

I hope to meet as many of you as possible this week and lend as much support as I can.

You can find me in the Expo Thursday and Friday mornings. TrainingPeaks is sharing a booth with Philadelphia Insurance Company and I'll have free WKO+ trial CD's and some coupons to hand out to those who stop by.

I'd also like to invite everyone to visit the Ultrafit open house Thursday from 1-3pm at the Royal Kona resort. Look for Joe Friel, Kevin Purcell, Karen Buxton and more of the Ultrafit coaches and athletes hanging out in the bar near the pool. Sponsors of the Ultrafit Open House include Descente and InFinit Nutrition.

For those relaxing and not racing this week in Kona feel free to join me for my annual Koloko Road hill climb. This is an epic 5,000ft climb that starts right in the village of Kona and literally heads up into the clouds to an elevation of 5,000ft. 15% grades are the norm and some serious climbing gears are necessary.

Here is the map of my ride from 2005: Click Here

However, if you are lacking the proper gearing you are welcome to start out with me and enjoy the ride as far as you want. Stop by the Philadelphia Insurance/TrainingPeaks booth Friday morning for details.

Good luck to everyone this week!

Caio,
Dirk

Peaksware & Microsoft HealthVault and More News Items...

A lot has been happening behind the scenes in recent months at Peaksware, and it is finally time to share the news with the world. Our biggest news item was officially made public yesterday in Washington DC where Microsoft held a press conference to announce it's new Microsoft HealthVault. We are excited to provide Peaksware products, including our FitnessPeaks site, which are now built on HealthVault, Microsoft Corp.’s newly launched consumer health platform.

“FitnessPeaks, built on the HealthVault platform, is helping us deliver on the promise of connecting and improving healthcare,” said Peter Neupert, corporate vice president for the Health Solutions Group at Microsoft. “FitnessPeaks provides consumers with the opportunity to collect, share and act on their health and fitness data.”

Bill Gates has a great letter published within today's Wall Street Journal which outlines his vision for managing personal health records. He makes a great point about how managing health is very information centric and providing complete health history data to health professionals is almost impossible in the current state of fragmented databases. Our health crisis can be minimized if the public had an easy way of managing their own health records and had the ability to share that data with whom they wished.

By enabling the HealthVault synchronization within TrainingPeaks and FitnessPeaks individuals can automatically have their exercise data saved to their personal HealthVault daily. This allows the person to access their not only their activity data but also view data that may be synchronized by other devices and services they subscribe to. Through the HealthVault individuals can synchronize blood pressure monitors, glucose meters, activity and nutrition data to their account and choose who to share that data with.

The true value in the HeathVault will be when an individual can share their historical data with medical and health professionals who can then analyze health trends and be able to provide more effective advice. Currently physicians and health care professionals tend to prescribe based upon very recent and acute symptoms, rather than any historical data. Those recomendations might be better served if the professional were to have access to a larger database to analyze and be able to see the whole picture.

Login today and try it out. Look for the Microsoft HealthVault account setup under the Preferences menu within TrainingPeaks and FitnessPeaks.

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Matt Fitgerald in NY Times...
Triathlon and running coach Matt Fitzgerald has been getting some great exposure lately with his recent books, magazine articles and now within an article in today's NY Times.