A Passion for Running

I helped my parents move some stuff out of their house on Sunday and paid for it with a very sore back yesterday. Rather than chance it getting worse (because it can get damn bad), I chose to rest, drink a couple beer and watch Kill Bill 2 with Aaron and Christopher while Lori and Cassandra went flowergirl dress shopping with Aaron’s fiance’ Tanya.

I felt good this morning so on the way to work I rushed to Scona track with my new Speed, Distance & HR monitor. My intention was to calibrate the foot pod so I could measure speed and distance during today’s lunch run but being rushed to get to work, I also rushed through the minimum required distance for calibrating the monitor (400 meters). The result was I’m sure I screwed things up.

I still used the monitor though. Corinne, Nick and I ran our regularly scheduled Wednesday four-hill route today due to a conflict Corinne had in her schedule. The run was difficult (but good) and the monitor worked great even though neither Corinne or I particularly appreciated the distance it measured for the route. Until today, we’d estimated it was 10km but Finnish Polar technology (albeit poorly calibrated technology) tells us it is bang-on 9km. Perhaps we will have some redemption next week once I’ve got the monitor better calibrated.

In that vein, I went back to the track after work to try recalibrating the monitor. I did a total of 3-800 meter runs before I felt like I knew had calibrated the thing correctly. I’m obviously a slow learner. Anyway, once I had it I did 2-400 meter test runs. Seems like I got it pretty close. It read 0.39km each time and I know it rounds down so it might have been even closer to 400 meters than 390 meters as the monitor said. Still, that’s only 97.5% accurate compared to Polar’s claim of 99% accuracy. It doesn’t sound like a big deal but 2.5% error over 26.2 miles is a 1 kilometer error!

I think I’ll try another calibration later in the week now that I know how not to screw it up!

A strange thing about doing the calibration though. I ran the 800s and 400s pretty fast and it really didn’t feel fast at all. After doing the 800s, the monitor told me I did the 400s in 1:40 and I know I ran those at a slightly slower pace than the 800s. That’s pretty good since 1:40 is a 3:20 800 meter pace. Neat.

Using this tool/toy is going to be sooooo sweet. So many options are now available to me. I can run intervals wherever I want (bye bye “peace mile”). I can do a long run wherever I want without pre-plotting a course. The monitor will even auto-record laps based on a distance I specify (e.g. every km). How cool is that?

I’ll definitely be writing more about the monitor so stay tuned.