I had a love/hate relationship with my former personal trainer, but it was always great to have someone to turn to for feedback on how I was performing. That coaching is the biggest draw of the Pace system. It monitors your distance traveled by tapping into your phone's GPS and studies your heart rate if you're wearing a third-party Bluetooth-enabled monitor. Oakley says this feature "will work with any Bluetooth-enabled smartwatch or fitness tracker with a heart rate monitor."

The Radar Pace has what Intel and Oakley call a dual-initiative system, which, in layman's terms, means that either you or the device can start a conversation. You can ask the Pace how you're doing or it can tell you, without any prompts and after some time, how to improve your progress. And in case you interrupt each other, the Pace will cache your questions while it's speaking and get back to you after it finishes what it had to say.

During my demo, Oakley's rep asked a slew of questions about his pace and cadence while running on a treadmill. The device told him that his stride rate was 85, and then, when he asked how good that was, it told him he needed to speed up and hit 88. All this in a calm, Siri-like voice that, let's be real, isn't nearly as motivating as a gruff, buff trainer yelling, "FASTER!" Still, it's nice to know how you're doing as you're running so you can correct your technique during the workout rather than try to fix it afterward.

Once you're done, you can tell the Pace to end the workout, and if you haven't completed the session it designed for you through the companion app (for iOS and Android), it will ask you, tentatively, if you really want to give up (you weakling, you). Through the app, you can create workouts, monitor your heart, cadence, distance and pace history and overlay graphs of each. The interface I saw seemed dead-simple and appeared to have tons of information that avid runners would find useful. Novices like myself will probably be more taken by the glasses themselves, which meet IPx5 standards for resistance against rain, sweat and some splashes.