Unwired Running

Yesterday I really wanted to get a 5 miler in over lunch. As I was heading out a coworker in the elevator asked me what was on my wrist.

"Ah, that's my GPS. It tells me how far I've run and how fast. It really suits my type A engineering personality that wants to know all the little details of everything."

Whatever I said must have offended my dear Garmin because after that it refused to cooperate. Getting a signal downtown is always a pain thanks to all the tall buildings, but after standing around waiting for a signal with no luck I was getting impatient. Not to mention that there were some pretty ominous looking clouds off in the distance that I was hoping to avoid. My Garmin always catches a signal the fastest while it is sitting on my dashboard and I am zooming down the highway. I thought I should try and apply the same principal so I started zooming down the pathway. Still acquiring... Finally it gave up and asked me if I was indoors. No... Have you moved more than 100 m since you turned the unit on? Um, I hope so....busted. After that I gave up, but out of habit I kept glancing down every once in awhile to see that despite all the running I had been doing I had still moved 0 feet. My shins were complaining. I wasn't really a happy camper. As I hit the pedestrian bridge at Crowchild the rain drops started to fall. Luckily it wasn't an all out downpour and the falling rain actually felt really nice. My shins decided to get on board with the rest of my body and they stopped hurting. I stopped taking walk breaks. Finally the run was feeling good! I just kept going and finished up in 51 minutes on a route that I knew was 5 miles (later confirmed with Gmaps). I even made it back to the office without looking like too much of a drowned rat. Success!