1.25.2009

Meandering

So I'm not volunteering today at the Half-Marathon Grand Prix race in Manhattan today. Honestly, it is way too freaking cold. I don't know how they got any volunteers for this race. Actually, I'm wondering how they got people to sign up for the race. Sure I'm one of the crazy ones who will (apparently) go running no matter how cold it is, but yesterday I was at a local sporting goods store. While standing in line to buy a box of Clif Shots I overheard a couple of runners saying how it is insane to go running the frigid weather we've been having lately. From this survey of three, it looks like only 33% of runners would even consider running outside in below freezing temps.

Anywho, I will volunteer at races later this year, but when the temps aren't in the teens. I've been using this time to take advantage of my neighbor's wi-fi (which hasn't shut down all morning...yet) and writing a couple of posts for the week.

In other news, I've now had a couple of runs with my Forerunner 405--Fenny. It's been great not having to worry about mapping out long runs, it's made getting out there on the weekends easier and quicker (especially now that I've been without Internet for two months, damn you Time Warner!).

I thought knowing my pace would be a help, but Fenny is kinda sketch about it. Like yesterday, for one example, I started my run by going over the Queensboro Bridge. The bridge rises 100+ feet, so it's not an easy climb, but I know I wasn't doing 14:00+ min/mile like Fenny said I was doing. Then, I looked at my run today and while the pace and speed are pretty consistent for most of the run, there are places where the speed spikes to 20 or 30 mph--which I'm pretty sure is impossible.

Also, there's the issue with elevation. Once again with yesterday's run there was one point that the first time I ran through it was logged as 200ft, the second time I ran through there? 100ft. I guess that's just the margin of error on the GPS?

Any one else have experience with these two anomolies?

BTW, Flyers26: thanks for the heads up on locking the bezel. When I started the run I thought I had locked the bezel. However, at one point I looked at Fenny saw a screen I had never seen before. I spent a good couple of minutes figuring out how to get back to the right screen and then locked the bezel immediately afterward.

2 comments:

Jess said...

Below freezing is cold, and would be too cold for me, but there are a lot of blogs I'm reading from runners in MN, MI, ND, and Canada who are running in sub-zero temps!

The Laminator said...

I agree...volunteering today would not have been fun. Running in the freezing temps was bad enough...i can't imagine just standing out there...

A couple of hints about the GPS:

1)Do not count on the current pace setting on the watch to figure out how fast you're going...it's usually not very accurate because the error range is 50 feet...use your average pace over the last half mile or mile as an estimate.

2)The elevation function is useless on the GPS. It's been written about in a lot of the forums. Check out the Electronics forum in Runners World website. I forgot the exact reason off top of my head, but yeah, it's totally unreliable. Might as well, use the elevation on mapmyrun.

Hope this helps.