Spring is right around the corner. Our hibernation will soon be over, flowers will bloom, the first rays of spring sun will warm up your mind, and your body will require an increase in physical activity to shift you out of your winter torpor.

You want to lose weight and be ready for summer? Great! Runtastic wants to help one of YOU get fit and feel terrific just in time for the warmest months of the year!

We will support one lucky user by providing him or her with a variety of Runtastic products and services, to help kick start a successful weight loss regime. We’ll share his or her progress with all other users on our blog and social networks – throughout the spring and summer months – to help motivate and inspire the entire Runtastic community!

Application conditions:

• You must be a man weighing 100+/- kg or a woman weighing 80+/- kg

• You must send us an application (max. 1 page) with a picture, explaining:

1. How much weight you want to lose

2. The reasons you are overweight

3. Why you are motivated

 

Please send your application to this email address by March 17, 2013:  springintosummer@runtastic.com

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Hi! My name is Victor, I am 25 years old, and I consider myself a sportsman and a fighter.

Before my accident, sport had always been present in my life. But, everything changed in 2005 when I suffered an accident playing in a pool. I hit the bottom with my head and from that moment, my body was motionless. Those seconds, motionless under the water, were an eternity for me. The only thing in my mind was the great will to breath again and to live. I felt great distress, because no muscles were responding.

In that moment I totally broke down, I started to cry and to think of all the things I hadn’t done because of laziness. I thought of all that moments that I told myself “I will have time, some other time.” While all those thoughts were going through my mind, and there was nothing else but tears running down my cheeks, I promised myself that if I could walk again, I would never give up. I promised I would undertake new challenges and I wouldn´t let myself become stagnant.

In that moment, I promised that if I could walk again I would do the Way of St. James every year so long as my body and means would allow me.

 

After the operation and my recovery, it was time to go. From that moment, I started fighting and little by little I started to recover the motion in some parts of my body. I went through several phases: wheel chair, walker, crutches, etc. Due to the inability to do exercise, I weighed 102 kilos, with a height of 1.74 meters.

It is then when you realize how simple things, such as the feeling of passing over carpet on the floor, can be a great obstacle and/or goal for some people.

Everything changed the day my doctors said: “You can do all the sport you want.” From that moment, I began to tackle personal challenges in order to overcome the remaining obstacles.

In the search for motivation and personal growth, I began to engage in sports again. Shortly thereafter, I started with solid nutrition and soon weighed 90 kilos. I then started rowing, and after a lot of training I weighed 69 kilos – the weight that I have maintained until this day.

During the last three years, I have trained to compete with my mates in the top rowing category in Galicia, and in my free time I go running or biking. I also kept my promise and until now I have always completed the Way of St. James. I fight with my soul to get what I want. The more adverse or difficult the situation is, the more motivation I have. I always face the fear and reach my objectives.

 

This motivation led me to the Titan Desert, an epic international mountain bike marathon. With the help of runtastic I completed my biking trainings, which helped me improve and increase my endurance.

With the runtastic app, I have the support I need for route I complete. The best feature is its versatility for every terrain and training. It helps me to control my status, my partial numbers, and the route. It is great to plan the next routes I will complete and to be aware of my physical condition in the different stages of the mountain. At the moment, I go to the gym four days a week and I bike three. Sometimes I even double some trainings! As the Titan Desert day comes closer, I will continue biking more often.

You can follow my trainings, comment, and share the experience via my runtastic profile “Victor Manuel Reyes Tasende”

 

We admire the achievements and courage of Victor and wish him continued strength in its activities and much fun!

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Francesca Rizzi is our runtastic User of the Month for December. She is from New Zealand but lives in London. She has always been passionate for running and thanks runtastic she got even more motivation and energy.

Read her interview to know more about her.

- Introduce yourself? (Your city/country, your name, your age, etc.)

My name is Francesca Rizzi. I am a Kiwi-Brit, born in Canterbury, New Zealand, but living in London. I am 37 and I have been running since I was fourteen, but never competitively. I switched to longer distance running, from 5-10km runs, in early 2011 and these days long-distance (20km or more) is all I want to do. Everyone I know in real life and in the runtastic community urges me to run a marathon. I know I could do it but I haven’t taken the plunge yet! I probably will one day, since my distance to date is capped at 35km, and I seriously doubt it is possible to get through the next 7km without the help of race crowds!

- How long have you been using runtastic? Why did you start using it? Which apps?

I used another vendor’s running app at first but changed to runtastic sometime in 2012 and imported my activity data from before over to here. I care about distance, pace and elevation, but I don’t measure heart rate. Live tracking/cheering and the Facebook add-in are by far the best aspects of the runtastic app beyond its ability to track the running itself.

- How many times per week are you using runtastic?

I am running about three times per week at the moment. In October I had thirteen activities (all running, all over 20km except the first one, which was a recovery run after a calf-strain) and I completed 295 km, which was about double my previous monthly record. If you want to know why that is, I am convinced it is the peer-support and motivation that comes from other members of the community here! Apart from recording activities, I am active on the site several times most days checking out what my online friends are doing!

- Did runtastic change your life / your health / your sports or fitness habits?

As I’ve said already, the social-networking side of runtastic is what has made the biggest change in my running. I never would have believed that, before I started linking up with others via friendships. But the experience of mutual support and encouragement with a much larger, more diverse group of people with common interests is so powerful that it (still) amazes me, and makes me want to get out running a lot more, just to hear the cheers!

- What do you think about the runtastic fitness portal/community?

I underestimated the difference a virtual support crowd would make to my runs; I would have found a place like this sooner! Once you start interacting here the level of mutual encouragement just explodes in my experience. Keep the social functionality up to date and I am sure runtastic will be a big magnet for enthusiasts of all relevant sports.

 Team runtastic congrats Francesca for her motivating force and we hope that the runtastic users will be more important to cheer Francesca!

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Greg Heil of Singletracks.com, the ultimate source for mountain biking reviews, trail, maps and product information, compares riding solo to hitting the trails with friends:

Don’t get me wrong—I love riding with other people. But sometimes a solo ride is just what I need.

Sometimes it’s fun to blaze around in the woods chasing a group of friends, passing back and forth, and stopping every now and then to wait for people to catch up. It’s definitely fun standing around, chatting and drinking beer (until someone decides that we’ve been spending too much time standing still). Then there are other times when I’m riding with just one good friend and we get to cruise around at a relaxed pace. The ride is just as much about the conversation as the exercise.

And then there are the rides—you know the ones—when the “group ride” would be more accurately labeled as a “race without a start gun.” When you have a few guys together who are equally fit, you’d have a hard time convincing any one person that he’s not in the Leadville 100. They are determined to ride their friends into the ground, dangit! There are so many benefits to riding with others, including companionship and motivation. And the best way to get faster is to push yourself by riding with people faster than you.

But sometimes, at least for me, it can get tiring. Yeah, I know getting tired is the point of mountain biking. But I mean tired of waiting for people to fix flats and broken derailleurs, the pressure of keeping up with the wheel in front of you, and the noise of whoops and hollers as someone almost flies off the mountain but manages to hang on. After so many of those rides, the solitude of the forest disappears. Instead of escaping from the busyness of the world, it seems to follow you there.

When that happens, it’s time to ride solo. Solo rides epitomize catharsis. The hustle and bustle of the city fades away. Other human voices? There are none. It’s just me and the woods. There’s no struggle to coordinate schedules and meet at a certain time. I leave the house when I want and get to the trailhead when I want. As soon as I’m ready, I head out and hit the trail. How fast I ride is totally up to me. If I’m feeling like a chill roll through the woods at a pace that would normally cause me some good-natured teasing, no one is there to complain!

Or if I’m sick of the rides that seem like I had to wait at every intersection, I head out alone. I drop the hammer and just ride and ride and ride—for hours if I like—and I don’t stop for anything. I’ll ride until I feel tired, and then keep riding.

So get out there and ride. And if you haven’t recently, try pedaling solo.

Do you like solo rides, or do you prefer to bike with friends? Tell us what you think!

Greg Heil started riding mountain bikes seriously in 2007, and since that time has ridden hundreds of trails all across the United States. He is the Social Media Coordinator, and an editor, for Singletracks.com, which is your source for everything mountain biking: the number one mountain bike trail map database in the world, a daily blog, gear reviews, forums, photo of the day, and more! Be sure to drop by Singletracks.com the site and check it out, and to “like” them on Facebook and “follow” them on Twitter.

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About six months ago, I wanted to get in better shape to improve my golf game. Running seemed like the easiest workout option, since I could run outside, on my own schedule. I had run on and off since middle school, but I had never gone more than a few miles at a time. When I started running again, it was as hard as ever, and I knew I needed some extra motivation. A friend of mine had been trying to convince me to run a race with him, so we signed up for The Giant Race, a half marathon just over four months away.

As soon as I was registered for the race, I created a training schedule and started running five times per week. There were days when I would have rather skipped runs, but knowing that the race was coming up soon got me to stick with it and push myself.

I’ve always liked tracking my runs, even before GPS. When I was in middle school, I would run around the neighborhood, and then have my mom drive the same route to see how far I had gone. For a while I used a Nike + sensor, but now that I have an Android phone, I decided to track my runs with runtastic. Being able to track my time, distance, and calories made it easy to follow my training, and I could make each run a competition to beat my previous time or distance.

At some point during my training, I started to enjoy running. Instead of seeing it as something I “should do” or “had to do,” I started thinking of running as something I wanted to do. If I was stressed about work, I would look forward to going running that night to relax. I was also lucky that I could run along the water on a great path with views of theGolden GateBridge. There was always something interesting to see on my runs, including a woman who fed pigeons and would usually have six or seven of them perched on her arms and shoulders.

Last weekend I ran my first half marathon in two hours flat. Using runtastic made it easy to maintain my goal pace, and all of my training had paid off: I finished the last six miles at a much faster pace than I had hoped. The race started and finished atAT&TPark, home of the San Francisco Giants, and it felt great to cross my first finish line inside the baseball stadium.

Even though the race is over, my training isn’t going to stop. I’m still just as motivated to go out and run. I’ve found a challenging, rewarding sport that I can do anywhere, for the rest of my life. For now I’m going to focus on intervals and getting faster, but soon enough I’ll be ready to try another half marathon and improve my time.

 Author Greg Lynch was born and raised in California’s Bay Area and now lives in San Francisco. He works in advertising and is passionate about golf and beer.