Archive for September 30th, 2008

Had a happy 7 w/8 100m strides today.  The weather is gorgeous, really felt like Fall is just around the corner.  I guess technically it’s here already, but until I get a run under 60 degrees, it’s still the end of Summer to me.

A nice thing for frequent commenter and blogger Dogpound and I, we were linked on a cool Scranton City blog yesterday.  It’s an article about Steamtown, check it out.

So I forgot to mention the other day I did something astounding last Saturday…left my Garmin at home.  Yep, I used my Ironman watch for the first time, bought days before the Garmin, but never used.  The thing is more confusing to me than the Garmin but after scouring the directions sheet for too long, I figured out how it works.

What drove me to it was the usual thing of wanting to deal with my Garmin dependency in general, but also, I’ve been annoyed with Garmin’s inaccuracies lately.  I finally noticed that a great part of the path where I run is marked, albeit on the ground and very faint in some areas, but enough that I could check my real time against the Garmin.  What an eye-opener it was on Sunday’s 18-miler.

I wore the Garmin that day, but took it off auto-lap, pressing the lap button whenever I passed a marker.  I went a little crazy with it because I was so intent on finding out what’s really going on, that I ended up with 50 laps!  Obviously, it kept me happily occupied during the run.

What I discovered was, when you use the lap button to mark laps and then look at the resulting pace in Garmin Training Center, the distance multiplied to make a mile (.25 mile x 4) does not equal the Garmin avg. pace listed in the program.  This is a big deal and changes the average totals.  Sometimes it’s faster, sometimes slower, but rarely equivalent to the Pace in TC or on the Garmin itself, while in use.  However, if you do a programmed workout on the Garmin (like 5×600), the multiplication works, it’s just manually entered laps that don’t equate.

What does this mean?  It means it’s better to manually mark laps in a race (as I’ve been doing) and also, in a race, to ignore the pace information completely (beyond instantaneous, even avg. lap pace) which pretty much invalidates the use of the Garmin except for analyzing later.  Now maybe this has something to do with where I live, I know when we were out West (and closer to the sky), it was perfectly accurate, and maybe when the trees lose their leaves that’ll make a difference, but I’m more mistrustful of my Garmin than ever, which ends up being a good thing, as now I will use the park markers more often.

Oh, and you can imagine that upon discovering this, I totally mistrusted my whole training history and had a major freakout, but with a little help from mapmyrun.com, I discovered my intervals and tempos were correct, nothing wildly off there.  Whew! But tomorrow, I’ve got 8 w/3×1600 and I’ll be using the mile markers, so make that 3xmile.  I’m going to go ahead and wear the Garmin for uploading afterwards but tomorrow, it’s just a big fat watch.