Sunday, October 28, 2012

New toy

It's the short interlude between "too hot" and "too cold" which means we have started running a bit more properly again. Over the summer the temperature meant it was impossible to do much, and the rare times that we tried just resulted in injuries. But over the past few weeks we have gradually built up to managing the run to work which is a fun start to the day. Every weekend, we now see lots of people jogging along the beach in their new Shonan Marathon t-shirts in preparation for the upcoming event. Unfortunately, we didn't manage to get an entry in for it this year. It must have been blind luck that we got in last year, as it is oversubscribed and if you don't log on at the right time, too bad. There are plenty of other events, of course, but none so convenient for us.

I was shopping for some bicycle related stuff from my favourite on-line store (crazy, I know, but it's often cheaper, and certainly much easier, to get even Japan-manufactured stuff sent from the UK than go shopping for it here) when I realised that I could justify adding new toy to the order due to the offer of free postage and  a money off voucher. In the past I'd vaguely considered getting a heart rate monitor and/or GPS watch, not that either is particularly essential, but the Garmin Forerunner 110 seemed like reasonable value as a combined package, and I know that Stoat seems to quite like his. It duly turned up and this morning I took it out for a little jog. In place of the Shonan Marathon, we have a low-key 5km event next weekend so thought it would be a good idea to try running quite fast (well, by our standards) to remind ourselves what it feels like. Unfortunately it was lightly raining which makes the shiny stone paving along the prom very slippery. But at least it wasn't baking hot :-)

The distance seems acceptably close to that estimated by walkjogrun.net which I have used in the past for measuring runs, even though the route doesn't quite match the reality. It certainly seems a lot more convenient than my previous approach of measuring and pacing runs by hand!

3 comments:

William M. Connolley said...

Aha, I wondered why you'd "friended" me on garmin connect, now the truth is out. You might like http://www.heiaheia.com/ too, if you don't have an equivalent already. I think this: http://www.heiaheia.com/users/25154282389/training_logs is me.

James Annan said...

Seem to be loads of these data processing/sharing sites - I was wondering if any of them are much use. I thought all the kool kids were on strava, but then again, that seems to be mostly focussed on hill climbing, and you are in Cambridge :-)

William M. Connolley said...

Endomondo is what the CSR runners use. HH happens to be what my rowing club goes for. I tell HH my weight each morning and it draws me nice graphs.