Active Forecast

Have you ever driven home in pouring rain and thought to yourself, “I wish I would have brought by running shoes to work today, I could have run at lunch when it was beautiful outside…”  Even if you’re checking weather info from your phone, if you don’t remember which workouts are scheduled for which days, it can be frustrating to switch between apps and calendars to double-check.

Here’s a helpful new iPhone app called Active Forecast. It’s weather data for athletes.  Connect it to your TrainingPeaks account and you can even see each day’s workout from inside the app.

Once you’ve downloaded the App to your iPhone (there are Lite (free) and Full ($2.99) versions), you can go in and adjust the settings based on your workout weather preferences.  You can also connect it to your TrainingPeaks account so the calendar will show your workout information for each day.  Here’s a screenshot of what the 7 day forecast view looks like:

What do the red, yellow and green boxes mean? Depends on how you customize the settings, but they’re colored based on the weather that you chose as optimal for your workouts.   You can go in and select which weather conditions you’re looking for based on precipitation, temperature and humidity, then the app colors the calendar based on your preferences.   Green = good time to workout outside, red = look for an indoors option.  The App can also pull in information from your calendar, so if you’ve got a meeting at 6pm, it will mark your Evening in red because of the conflict.  Tapping on the colored square explains why it’s colored red/yellow/green, so you can easily see if it’s red because of a schedule conflict or because of bad weather.  You can also set the times of day (ex. “morning” for you may be from 5am- 8am) based on your schedule.

Then comes our favorite part: linking it to your TrainingPeaks account so it can pull your workout information directly into the App.  Just fill in your account info and it’ll automatically sync.

Once you’ve got your preferences set up and have linked the App to your TrainingPeaks account, your day view will look like the picture below.  If you tap on the activity, you can even see a description of the workout!

To get the App, you can search “Active Forecast” from the App store on your phone, or you can visit the author’s website at www.activeforecast.com You can also check out Active Forecast on twitter and facebook.

** UPDATE: Version 1.2 was released on March 17, 2011 with improved features:

• New and improved Location management.
• Improved the ability to send an email from within the app to Share it with your friends.
• Improved accuracy of sunrise & sunset data.
• Improved accuracy of weather data.
• Improved response time for picker labels.