I went geared today. My knees are aching, which is partly a function of my age, but also partly a function of too many miles on fixed! Still, I like the sentiment.
Bumped into a group of roadies after my ride today. We all hit Java Blend on North at about the same time. One of the guys looked like Garrett MacFadyen, winner of IM Canada in 2002 but I'm sure I'm wrong. Either way, the Garrett-dopleganger was the only guy who would talk to me, the other guys wouldn't even give me the raised eyebrow/nod greeting. I guess they thought I was a sandbagging Uitlander sitting in for the sprint, whereas all I was doing was sitting in for a coffee. One of the guys was wearing the full Rapha Condor kit; what can I say?
I think it was a nice ride today, it was hard to tell. I recall pleasantly dry roads and little or no wind for a jaunt through the dark-side to Caldwell Road and back. My Garmin, however, looked like this.
As far as a bit of kit goes, it is currently moribund. On the U-shaped curve that gives problems vs time for electronic equipment (ask your IT provider at work, they should know this graph, given that it's the only graph in IT!) , it's way on the right-hand side of the graph.
When I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago (the Garmin climbing the right-hand side of the graph) la belle, however, didn't seem to think it was entering it's senescent phase, insisting that all it needed was a couple of days in a bag of desiccant. Therefore, the display remaining like this despite being fully charged and after multiple hard resets (mode/lap reset)....
...was clearly all in my head. Regardless where the glitch was (in the 305 or in my occipital lobe) it was a pity because as we all know, if a ride (run, whatever) doesn't appear on your Garmin then it didn't happen!
I'm not sure what to do with a marathon coming up and an imaginary Garmin. Psychologically I'm suddenly feeling quite unsure about the whole thing, and to be honest I wasn't exactly feeling "fully engaged" about MDI in the first place. I haven't quite gone totally wobbly; stamped my feet, folded my arms, pouted, thrown my proverbial toys out of the pram and said "I'm not going" yet, but I think we can probably all feel a certain empathy with that sentiment!
It looks like I'll be going retro, back to how we did things in ye olden days, which was a regular Timex, mile-markers and mental math. It always used to keep me sane for the first two hours (in the third hour I was usually just a basket-case anyway and didn't have the capability for mental math)! I've heard it said that a Garmin can actually make you think too much about your pace and be a hinderance not a help. La belle, for one, has run PBs in the marathon with a dead Garmin, almost released by the 205's death to run her real pace rather than constrained by the idiot box to run an artificial pace "because that's what the chart says". There's merit to that idea.
Unless the Garmin miraculously heals itself in the next ten days, or I receive a sudden infusion of cold, hard dollars then I'll have to wean myself off my Garmin dependency pretty quickly, Garmin cold-turkey if you will. Should be an interesting ten days!
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