Extracting running data out of NRC/Nike + (Nike Run Club) using API’s

For the past few weeks, I have been struggling to see the running kilometers getting updated in my Nike + App. It could be a bug or a weird feature of the app and since this was kind of a demotivation, I decided to go ahead and create my own dashboard to calculate the results. Also, Nike has discontinued viewing and editing activities on the web.

Considering, I had about 8 years of data and you never know when this kind of apps stop to exist or when they become paid versions. It’s always better to persist your data to a known source and if required use it to feed it into any other application. I also went ahead and uploaded my data to UnderArmour's “MapMyFitness” App which has much better open-source documentation.

It turns out that there is a lot of additional information the NRC app captures which are typically not shown on the mobile app. Few of the information include

1. Total Steps during the workout including detail split between intervals
2. Weather Details during the workout
3. Amount of the time the workout was halted for
4. Location details including latitude and longitude information that can help you plot your own Map

Coming to the API part, I could not get hold of any official Nike documentation, but came across some older blogs https://gist.github.com/niw/858c1ecaef89858893681e46db63db66 in which they mentioned few API endpoints to fetch the historic activities. I ended up creating a spring-boot version of fetching the activities and storing it in a CSV format in my Google Drive.

The code can be downloaded here -> https://github.com/shailendrabhatt/Nike-run-stats (temporary unavailable)

The code also includes a postman repository which contains a Collection that can also be used to fetch one’s activities. Just update the {{access_token}} and run the Get requests.

While the blog that had details of the API was good enough, a few tips that can be helpful

• Fetching the Authorization token can be tricky and it has an expiry time. For that, you will need a https://www.nike.com/se/en/nrc-app account and fetch the authorization token from the XML HTTP request headers for the URL type api.nike.com. There are few requests hitting this URL and the token can be fetched from any of them.
• The API described in the link shows details of after_time, one can also fetch before_time information

/sport/v3/me/activities/after_time/${time}

/sport/v3/me/activities/before_time/${time}

• Pagination can be easily achieved using the before_id and after_id. These ids are of different formats ranging from GUIDs to a single-digit number and can be confusing.

Hope this information was useful and hopefully you will be able to persist, secure and make more use of your data.