The Long Lay Off Ends and Others

I've been silent for a while. Various factors came into play, but I'm back and running again.

I had a last minute business trip which caused me to miss a 10k I intended to run. This was unfortunate for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that the top times were within reach of my personal bests, so I might have been able to do relatively well. Of course, the route was very hilly so it might have impacted my potential times.

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I have found, looking back over my training records for the past year, that I am a much more reliable runner when I have a goal. So I've given myself a goal. We'll see how this works out. I had planned to do this in October, but I just couldn't get the time to train properly.

Stay tuned for updates. Encouragement and advice warmly accepted! (Remarks along the lines of 'you idiot', while not necessarily off base, are not.)

Kit Review

As my few regular readers recall (ahhh, alliteration...) I promised some updates on my Garmin Forerunner 405. I'm happy to say that it appears the Garmin people were reading my blog. They've made some improvements.

In summary my initial review was that the watch was great, but the Garmin Connect functionality kind of let it down. I'm happy to say that it appears they are working on my comments.

• The Garmin Connect website is now significantly faster and smoother to use.
• They adjusted the scaling on the elevation plot so you can actually see some details, instead of showing you from sea level up (great if you're in Groton, CT not so good if you're up over 1,000 feet). Below is an example of the new graph:

Here is what it used to look like (if you're curious, the route is approximately the same):

There are still some fixes I'd recommend. Highest among them is some data averaging or fairing (look at the graph of my lunch run from yesterday):

Lots of spurious data points there that could be faired. Still, we're moving in the right direction here, and I'm happy.