Two-Week Check-in #2: I Started Running. It's Been Rough.

Hey Team! 👋

Alrighty, I know the letter is late, but I've been ... running 😲

Y'all know that I have never been a runner. It's always lift, sprint, jump, hoops. Then we started to build Mylz. And I should really be my own product's customer ... so bet.

Laced up a new pair of Brooks. 35km across three weeks. Shoutout to @solestop and @fastfoodruns for showing me what run club culture is all about. But... ankles: injured. nervous system: shook. lungs: inflamed. But we are getting data. 😅

This is extremely applicable:

On our product side: we are teaching our tag to detect running 🏃‍♂️💀

Nobody tells you about step detection: walking and running feel completely different to a sensor.

Problem 1: the sleepy observer. Imagine your foot is a ball. When you walk, it bounces gently and settles on the ground for a while. When you run, it slams down hard and flies back up in ~200ms. Fast and violent. Our original algorithm was like a sleepy observer. By the time it noticed your foot landed, your foot had already left. Great for walking. Completely blind to running.

Problem 2: counting every step twice. When your car goes over a speed bump, you feel it twice: once for the front wheels, once for the rear. Your foot does the same thing when you run: heel strikes, then toe pushes off. Two sharp signals, one real step. Our tag was counting both. We ran 5,000 steps and logged 13,279. 😬

Both are being fixed. Each run gets us closer. 📈

We are not done. But I am still running. Ankles permitting.

Keep on logging Mylz, Brian ✌️