What happens when technology fails

My training schedule says today is a 10 mile run day; let it be so! I haven’t run one of my favorite trails in a while, so headed up to Woodmen road park and ride and ran north on Sante Fe Trail through the Air Force Academy. It was a day of one minor problem after another. I started off with a missing Garmin watch. For those of us that run and/or bike, doing a workout without your GPS device is like eating Oreos without milk – it just can’t happen. In desperation, I snuck into Steve’s gym bag and borrowed his Garmin. For those who don’t understand what a major sin this is, let me explain. Steve tracks every single workout. The miles, the minutes, the pace, the power output, the heart rate…. Over time he accumulates average pace per week/month/year. Now, by wearing his Garmin watch, I have totally destroyed his average pace once I upload the Garmin data because my average running pace is equal to Steve running with his shoes tied together. I opted to log my own data in my tool and delete my workout from his Garmin to save him the disgrace of having my workout show up in his data. Now that I think about it though, wouldn’t it have been fun to let it be and he would be looking at that particular workout and try to figure out what happened! Knowing Steve, he would have figured something was wrong with the software and deleted it because it messed up his average pace. So, with the technical difficulties addressed with the Garmin, I set off on my run. Shortly into the run, my ipod on my iphone started messing with me. It would play about 30 seconds of a song and go to the next song. Now, the ipod on my runs is as critical as the Garmin. If either the Garmin or ipod is close to dead battery, that is sufficient reason to delay the run. With only a mile down and 9 to go, I had a serious dilemma. Fortunately the genius’ at Apple and Pandora have given me an alternative and I can listen to Pandora while I’m running. Not as good as my customized running list, but enough to get me through the next 9 miles. Once I had my Garmin on, my tunes going, I motored along and it turned out to be a beautiful day and had a great run.