Future trails and Garmin travails

Yesterday afternoon we hit the local outlet stores in search of a few needed items. My goal was to find some trail shoes and I tried on a bunch including the Adidas Kanadias, the Timberland Vaporate and the Nike Assail. Many runners I know eschew Nike and I'm not really sure why that is. I run with Nike Turbulence 13's and I find them to be very comfortable. I didn't really like the fit of the other maker's shoes and I ultimately chose a pair of Nike Tri-D Kutus which fit differently than the Turbs but feel very good. Later today we plan to do some running/hiking and I'll have a chance to test out the Kutus.

I did my first solo run with the Garmin 50 this morning covering 3.26 miles at an average pace of 9:00. It seemed accurate as I ran by my measured benchmarks and I liked how easy it was to toggle between distance and other real time metrics with a push of a button. I'll check the accuracy against Google Earth and adjust accordingly if necessary. I did have another negative experience with the Garmin software when I uploaded the data and it didn't hit the Garmin Connect site or show up on the dashboard. I wasn't upset because the watch retained the data but it seemed odd that the ANT wireless linking app didn't acknowledge the watch at all though I meticulously repeated the the TxPairing process a couple of times. I finally discovered the problem which is that the ANT app uploads the run to your PC but only sends the data if you are already logged into Connect. The work around (which took me a lot longer than it should have to figure out) was to pull the uploaded data from my file system and send it to Connect using the "Manual Upload" feature. Okay, I get it now but Garmin could be a little more clear about what the user should expect.

The good news is once Connect has the data the presentation is excellent. It shows a length of run graph that details pace, heart rate and cadence and even has a play feature that shows this combination of metrics at every stage of the run. I'm going to try to upload this file to MapMyRun a little later.