Friday, October 4, 2013

Running on Time

This year I bought a Garmin Forerunner 10 GPS watch to keep track of my running times. Overall, it has been very useful and simple to use. I just wish it could find GPS satellites faster. Sometimes it is ready to go within a minute. Other times, it seemed to take way too long. Once, and this was at the worst possible moment, my watch couldn't get a GPS signal at the start of a 5K race. It wasn't until about one mile in the race that it finally locked onto a satellite.

I have run about 130 miles and biked another 40 miles this year. I've been keeping track of my stats on Garmin Connect. This is a free website where I can upload data from my GPS watch.

My personal records so far:

1 Mile = 6 minutes, 49 seconds
5K =  24 minutes, 0 seconds
10K = 52 minutes, 27 seconds
Half-Marathon = 2 hours, 11 minutes, 0 seconds

I hope to enter and complete a half-marathon race by the end of next year. I can finish one right now, but it is slower than my goal. I want to keep training to get my legs stronger so I can finish in under 2 hours.

Before I started running seriously, I laughed at the thought of running any distance over one mile. I thought it would be impossible for me. Too far, too hard, plain crazy.

But, you know what? I just tried it once. Then again and again. Pretty soon, one mile wasn't enough any more.

So, I kept running regularly. Now, I look forward to it.

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