Yesterday begat my first long run since the marathon, but it also marked a huge upgrade of my training tools. I broke out my new Dick Tracy Garmin GPS watch, strapped it on and took off.
I had been wavering between the Forerunner 305 and 405, but when the 305 went on sale for less than half the price of the other one, I made the call and told Mrs. Tola it would be a nice early birthday gift. Now I just have to figure out how to use the dang thing.
The watch kept track of my time, pace, distance -- all handy information. Not bad. When I had time later, I intertransconfigurized the thing to work with my laptop (you guessed it -- USB cord) and "supposably" had access to tons of great data about my run.
Umm, not quite.
So far, all I've been able to see are some not-so-useful graphs of pace, distance, elevation. I can't quite seem to find anything about any splits. Maybe I need to manually keep track of those. Maybe I need to do something called "reading" involving a so-called "owner's manual." Or maybe I need to temper my expectation that my Garmin would be up there in the sliced-bread league of useful things. (Let's face it, that's a tough standard. Who doesn't like sliced bread?)
More bad news: The Garmin said my 13.1-mile course, which I had recently suspected of being more like 12.9 miles, is actually 12.56 miles. Jeez, talk about making a bad first impression. First, you're not 100% intuitive to use, then you're chopping away at my acccomplishments. (That's right, that's 3 C's.) On the plus side, I did run this course nearly 8 minutes faster than in my leadup to San Francisco. More detailed numbers will come if and when I can get Garmin to spit 'em out.
For now, any Garmin tips are welcomed, and I'll keep wearing the thing while I try to learn to use it. That'll be me with the giant watch. The yellow trenchcoat and fedora are on order.
No comments:
Post a Comment