Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Darn

Yesterday afternoon I had to take advantage of the freakishly warm weather and go for a run. I only had to wear my Nike cropped pants and a Nike Fit Dry shirt. No gloves! No jacket! No heavy pants! It was 64 degrees! In January!! OMGWTFBBQ!!!

I also strapped on my iPod, freshly loaded with music. I hadn't listened to music while running for about four months. What to listen to...what to listen to...I went with the music of my youth, Depeche Mode. Black Celebration, 1987.

I set out. Clear sidewalks, warm temperatures, less clothing, totally rocking tunes. I was on fire! I felt like I had wings on my feet! I was definitely moving at less than 9:00 per mile, but I refrained from peeking at my Garmin because I didn't want to fall into the psychological trap of "this is too fast I have to slow down" when I am physically capable of keeping such a pace. I just decided to run as fast as felt comfortable and hopefully I would have a nice surprise at the end of my run along the lines of "holy crap, I averaged 8:30 per mile on a four-mile run!"

I got a surprise, all right, but not a pleasant one. Closing in on the end of my run I sneaked a quick peek at my Garmin, hoping to catch with my eye only the distance field on the display (I wanted to ensure I ran a full four miles). To my dismay the device had shut down and the screen was blank. It had run out of battery power before I had even run 0.75 mile (the distance it did manage to record was 0.72). I thought I had my music turned up loud enough to drown out the lap alert beeps; I didn't hear them because it wasn't making them at all.

Well, phooey. That left me kind of deflated so for what was left of my run (maybe 0.25 mile) I slowed down and just moseyed along. I hadn't made note of the time when I left the house so I couldn't even see how long my run had taken according to the clock.

The first thing I did when I got home was plug in the Garmin for charging.

3 comments:

Candice Y said...

Worse than that is if your iPod goes dead. That totally sucks.

But I have had my watch go dead once, and it was truly crappy that I had no idea how well I did or how long I was out.

Ann (bunnygirl) said...

Well, there's nothing wrong with a "natural" run. I actually enjoy my runs better when I'm not bothering with my time. But yeah, when you're having an "on" day it really is nice to know just how "on" you are!

Fritz said...

If you plug it into your computer, it'll tell you when your run started- it won't tell you much more, but it's something right?

We all make mistakes... I have a quick release for my Garmin, so I can move it from my bike to my wrist and back again for Tris. I once drove to a group run with the heart rate strap on, the velcro band across my wrist... but no the GPS part. :P Oops.