Love working out but get burned out easily? Sounds like the story of my life. I have always been a very active person and definitely like to workout. However, I am also definitely the kind of person that goes through HUGE mood swings when it comes to health kicks. I often get myself super motivated by following fitness influencers’ Instagrams and coming up with elaborate plans to finally “get into shape” #hotgirlsummer. But no matter what I try, these health kicks normally only last a month, tops.
In college, I have really been trying to experiment with different ways to work out which are fun and effective, don’t wear too hard on my body and work with my busy ND student schedule. In the last year alone, I went through phases of running on the treadmill, joining cycling classes at Duncan, participating in the ND Club Boxing Team, following the weight lifting trend and even buying a membership on the SWEAT app. Even after all that, however, I still wanted to try something new for this year.
Image by Why Weight Ireland.
Before the end of the summer, my mom told me about an app she found called Zombies, Run. At first, I laughed at her for getting something so random and nerdy. But as soon as I got back to campus and struggled to think of how to exercise, I succumbed and downloaded the app. Basically, Zombies, Run is a free workout app developed by Six to Start that allows you to set the amount of time or distance that you want to run and choose a mission. The app is an audio guide narrating your mission to save humanity and discover the source of the zombie plague. The radio station communicator in the tower (your audio guide) leads you on missions to collect supplies, return to camp and save humanity— all while avoiding the zombies in the outside world. You can even activate the “Zombie Attacks” mode so hordes of zombies will almost catch you at various points during your run and you will have to speed up to escape.
In reality, you can run at your own pace and direction while the story is being narrated. In fact, there are different modes to properly guide outdoor runs, treadmill runs and even the elliptical/rowing machines. The app also offers extended missions which help you train for 5k races, 10k races, half-marathons and full marathons. To top it all off, the app allows you to use your own music on Spotify, Apple Music or any other external source and the audio guide will simply lower the music while it is narrating!
Image by Zombies, Run Creator
For the very first mission I did, I used the GPS tracker on the app to record my outdoor run. I had so much fun! The storyline was so entertaining and funny, and it did such a good job of distracting me from the fact that I was actually running. I felt like I was listening to a podcast or a book with my own music playing in the background (perfect combo in my opinion). On my mission, I survived a helicopter crash, outran two hordes of zombies and collected supplies to build up the basecamp. In the end, I sort of started thinking of the whole thing like a video game, which made me want to play (aka run, woohoo!) again. Afterward, I compared the app’s tracking with that of my Apple Watch, and it seemed pretty accurate. Overall, the app pushed me to run faster, and I had way more fun doing it! I mean, if a zombie apocalypse can’t motivate me to run, I guess nothing will.