Off The Beaten Path....

and onto city sidewalks and streets.

Yesterday, we abandoned our lake front path to test the new garmin along the streets. I forgot how much I love doing this....running until you hit a light and then turning so you don't have to stop. So how did Garmin do?

Good! You can see in the picture (if you click on it, the link will take you to favoriterun.com and you can zoom in. It does get a little jaggedy in some places and I had a lot of problems in the last mile keeping the signal. However, I have now added the gps sattelite accuracy to the data fields on the main part of the watch so I can see what's up during the run. I might not have had a great signal in the first place because it took awhile to get and then as soon as it had it, I was moving. I guess the idea is to leave it sitting still for awhile while you stretch etc etc.

I also was seeing some really really funny behavior in the elevation part of the data when I uploaded it to MotionBased. I am guessing I didn't ascent 2000 feet, nor is it likely that I descented 2000 feet. It was counting all the little up and downs the signal was getting and adding it all up and making it look like I was running over some kind of mountainous country (chicago=flat).
I then found in MotionBased, if you are looking at an activity, in the upper right hand corner there is a button that says Activity Options. If you click there, there is something called MB Gravity Elevation. Apparently this compares your data with a governmental database of elevations and then compares your position at ABCD.....and so on and compares each point to what your elevation should be. I did this and I got a nice flat line which is what I would expect. It also has us at 600ft, which is about where Chicago is about sea level. Excellent.
So the run stats. Felt good, wanted to slightly slow down a bit yesterday since we are racing tomorrow (wtf...racing tomorrow...not quite read). It was really fun to just run through the neighborhood and not be thinking about remembering where we went because I just came home, plugged in the watch and viola, the map is drawn. I am going to use the watch in the race tomorrow, maybe I'll try the virtual partner deal...hmm..

I have a question and I know that Bob had issues with this at first. Here it says that my distance was 5.04 miles (similar to what the watch says). but then MB recalculates it to be 5.21 miles....why doesn't it fix the laps also? Thanks!



Oh yeah, I also had this idea to drive the Chicago marathon course with the watch before the race and then put a little virtual partner on there running the course at an 8:25 pace....you could even program in where the water stops are so that it would tell you how far away from gatorade/water or whatever. I then noticed here that MB has already programmed this! Check it out here and have fun!