Sunday 2 August 2009

90 or 91 miles done?

There is a bit of confusion and frustration at the end of week 39. The planned 16.4 mile route started in Winlaton, went through Blaydon, over the Newburn Bridge, over the Scotswood Bridge, up the Derwent Walk, through Rowlands Gill, Linztford, Hamsterly Mill and Ebchester.

At the 12 mile point last night my Garmin GPS watch froze. I had to resort to switching it off and back on again. When it came back on line I was initially pleased to see that my run details had been preserved. Then I noticed that the mileage was back to 11.6 miles. What was that all about! I continued along the A694 and rang for Katy to pick me up at the 16.4 mile point which was 2 miles from home by my calculations.

I've tried to transfer the run data this morning from the watch and there are 2 issues. The first one is that although I can see the data in the watch it won't transfer to Garmin Connect. The second and most important issue is that the watch is saying that I ran 17.4 miles. So which is it Garmin? Did I run 16.4 or 17.4 miles? And why can't I get the data off to analyse it?

The main thing is that I appear to have ran at least the required 16.4 miles this week and hit the target of 90 miles. I'll now have to waste time looking at how to get the stats off my Garmin. Failing that I'll use mapmyrun.com to calculate the mileage. As it stands I have a dead Garmin 305 Forerunner and a seemingly unreliable Garmin Forerunner 310 XT. That represents a lot of investment by me. These things aren't cheap. More importantly than that is the fact that when I'm running across the USA I can't afford to have this kind of unreliability. Mind you, I will have the mileage mapped out by other means beforehand. I'm very annoyed with Garmin at the moment!