I take running seriously, not in the sense that I compete to win races (or even my age groups, though that happens at some smaller races), but in that I train for races to try to run my best time in them. Thus, I regularly think about how I can improve my times, both on training runs and for races. Not surprisingly, then, I spend more time than I should looking at and thinking about my running watch. What would probably surprise most people, especially most people who take their running seriously, is that I don’t have one of the cutting edge watches, though I have been thinking about upgrading recently.
When I began running about twenty years ago, I used a fairly standard digital watch with a stopwatch feature on it. I would drive the route I planned to run to measure out the distance. I didn’t know where particular miles ended (or, if I did, it was more of a guess than anything), so I couldn’t know if I was running faster or slower in any particular mile. Thus, when my parents bought my first Timex Ironman watch as a Christmas present (though I was the one who selected it), I was then able to mark my time with more precision. Even though I didn’t have a watch with GPS, I did use an online route creator, so I had more knowledge about mile markings.
Even that approach was pretty rudimentary, though. I would click the watch to mark a particular spot, as I still didn’t know where each mile began or ended, then check on the online route how far I had run. I would then calculate the time for that distance to get a decent estimate of my mile times. This approach worked well enough, as I continued to improve as long as I was healthy and avoided injury.
However, I recently took a new job, one with a health plan that enables me to earn points. You can probably see where this is going. Those points enabled me to get a new watch, one with GPS. I resisted doing so, but I began running more on greenways that I can’t measure by car or even online routes, and I’m too obsessive not to know exactly how far I’m running. The new watch not only gives me more accurate mile times, it can tell me (roughly) the pace I’m currently running, in addition to some biometric date (heart rate, especially).
When I began running about twenty years ago, I used a fairly standard digital watch with a stopwatch feature on it. I would drive the route I planned to run to measure out the distance. I didn’t know where particular miles ended (or, if I did, it was more of a guess than anything), so I couldn’t know if I was running faster or slower in any particular mile. Thus, when my parents bought my first Timex Ironman watch as a Christmas present (though I was the one who selected it), I was then able to mark my time with more precision. Even though I didn’t have a watch with GPS, I did use an online route creator, so I had more knowledge about mile markings.
Even that approach was pretty rudimentary, though. I would click the watch to mark a particular spot, as I still didn’t know where each mile began or ended, then check on the online route how far I had run. I would then calculate the time for that distance to get a decent estimate of my mile times. This approach worked well enough, as I continued to improve as long as I was healthy and avoided injury.
However, I recently took a new job, one with a health plan that enables me to earn points. You can probably see where this is going. Those points enabled me to get a new watch, one with GPS. I resisted doing so, but I began running more on greenways that I can’t measure by car or even online routes, and I’m too obsessive not to know exactly how far I’m running. The new watch not only gives me more accurate mile times, it can tell me (roughly) the pace I’m currently running, in addition to some biometric date (heart rate, especially).