Tuesday, March 3, 2009

3/3 Run, Workout, and Tech4O Review Part II

Tuesday was a GORGEOUS day in Seattle! iPhone said it was 55. Just wonderful. Perfect running temperature. Ran clockwise around lake, solo.

Both of my shins a little achy. Could be the front muscle down there, or it could be I got too aggressive when I rolled out this morning. :) My Right knee grumbled a little starting at mile 4. My current shoes are at 322 miles. I retired the first Foundations 7s at 346. May be about time for new kicks. Of course. They finally feel comfortable. That's probably the sign. :)

Ran with both Garmy and the Tech4O. I bumped the stride length for the runs on the Tech4O up 38 before I went out.

One annoying thing about the Tech4). If you go to exercise mode it automatically starts the session. This means that if you stop the session, then go back into exercise mode after the watch goes back to the clock automatically, it starts the session again.

Had some trouble with Garmys HR strap again. Tightened it up and used some puddle water (I know, ewwww) to get it wet again. Then it finally stopped losing it's mind. I got it wet before we left, but I must have been a bit conservative with the water.

Wandered through the exercise screens on the tech40 and noticed that speed is in mph. WTF? I don't know any runner who tracks their speed in mph, unless they're on a treadmill and it doesn't have a pace option.

During run I noticed that Tech4O was off by about .05 for every mile. At finish Garmy said we had done 6.39 in 1:01:20 (9:36/mile) @ 149 bpm. Tech40 said we had done 6.21. Which, if you do the math, is 95.7% accurate. Estimating, because of that whole annoying restart thing, the run was roughly 10000 steps. If we do the math for a 1" change of stride, that would add .158 miles, which doesn't quite get us to the distance. So I think I'll add 2" and we'll see how it looks on the next run.

Tech4O does have one big advantage that I can see over Garmy as either a HR Monitor, or if the distance estimation is reasonably accurate. That advantage is battery life. I'm considering a 50 miler, and realize that at my pace I will probably kill the battery in the Garmin before I'm done.

I'm trying to figure out a way to rank my runs by effort, distance and heart rate. I know Daniels has his points formulas, but I just want to be able to compare, and I don't recall he takes HR into account. Maybe multiply pace and distance by average hr to rank runs by effort? Hmmm....

Went to the gym after Kaitlyn went down and did the current workout. Started off with a pushup test to see how I stood for the 100 Day Challenge. Managed to do between 32 and 34. I kind of lost track in there, so we'll go with 32. This is great, because however many months ago when I did the evaluation for the 100 Pushups ting I only did like 20.

Did the rest of the workout normally, but was able to bump the chest press up to 27.5# dumbells and the squats to 35# dumbells (I wonder when you should switch to barbell squats?) I also did two sets of pullups 5@56, and 5@66. I can see why some articles don't like the weight assist. For some of the reps I really felt like I was letting the machine do the work for me.

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