How many times have you gone a mile into a run only to realize you forgot to start your watch? Or maybe you finished the run and left the tracking device going for 20 minutes. What about those times your phone or watch ran out of power?

Wouldn’t you like to head out the door without strapping on or carrying anything, without thinking about starting or stopping anything—and still have your run measured and logged? Under Armour wants to grant that wish.

On Leap Day, February 29, the company will release its first “Record Equipped” shoe with the built-in ability to track your runs. Under Armour calls it “untethered running” and believes it is the future of footwear.

A lightweight, dime-sized chip embedded in the midsole of UA’s SpeedForm Gemini 2 RE wakes every time you move the shoe (and sleeps the rest of the time to allow the battery to last three years, likely the life of the shoe). It senses a run whenever you start moving faster than 11 minutes per mile and begins tracking you using built-in accelerometers that measure your stride dynamics. While the chip does not have GPS and can't map your run, the formulas that interpret your stride promise to calculate distance at close to the same accuracy—and it will work on a treadmill. The chip will keep the run going during short stops, but ends the workout for any complete stops longer than three minutes. It begins recording a new run if you start up again.

When you get back to your phone, it uploads data via Bluetooth to your MapMyRun app (owned by Under Armour) where you can see distance, time, and pace. If you don’t sync with the app, the chip will save up to five runs before starting to overwrite them.

By syncing your shoe to the app before the run, the chip will also record stride cadence, a measure many consider key to improving your stride. You can view your steps per minute in real time on your phone, or you can analyze the data later, graphed over distance and the map of your route on the MapMyRun site. While the synced app uses GPS to track your run, it promises to react faster and provide better real-time pace measurements from the shoe than you can get through GPS. But you have to carry your phone and start and stop the app, just like now.

In addition to measuring your running, the chip keeps track of miles on the shoe—something that has always been onerous to log. The app displays the total miles you’ve put on the shoes and the number of miles left before the suggested 400-mile expiration. Under Armour sees this as something consumers will soon expect. 

“A shoe should be able to tell me how many miles it has on it,” says Fritz Taylor, vice president of Running Footwear at Under Armour. 

UA Interface
Jonathan Beverly
A look at the MapMyRun user interface with the Under Armour SpeedForm Gemini 2 RE.

In initial testing, we found the untethered aspect to be as user-friendly as advertised. After an easy pairing process with the app, the shoe measured every run automatically, starting and stopping accurately without any intervention necessary.

The upload process was smooth and painless, and the data was presented in useful screens. While the measurements are basic totals and averages and you don’t see them until after the run, this feels like the real strength of the technology. These are the shoes you put on when you’re just getting in daily miles and don’t want to carry or think about anything—but still want the run to get tracked and recorded.

The process of syncing the shoe to the app for real-time data was a bit trickier, but once synced, the shoe and app communicated seamlessly. Under Armour promises a smoother interface and better instructions before the release. They also anticipate that the chip will be able to give more stride dynamics measurements in the future.

At the moment, the Record Equipped option is only available in the Speedform Gemini 2, a well-cushioned daily trainer. Under Armour plans to expand the program to other shoes in the near future.

The Gemini 2 RE will retail for $150 (compared to $130 for the non-RE model) and includes a one-year subscription to the MapMyRun MVP program, a $30 value.