First long run today plus some updates

I'm behind in my marathon training. Today I ran 18.5 which is my longest run since the Twin Cities marathon last October. My body handled it just fine. Overall a sub-9:00 pace which is a very good long run pace for me. I have updates on two things today:

1) Heel lifts. I have my new vinyl heel lift and I did not tape it to my shoe insert. I was waiting to see what happened when my shoes got wet. Well, they got wet today because it was raining for most of the run. Around mile 11 the lift started sliding forward in my shoe so I stopped and took it out. That was confirmation that I definitely need to tape it to my shoe insert.

2) Garmin 310XT. I can't give a good review since this is the first GPS I have owned and since I have only used it once. It may become a future favorite of ultra runners since it has a maximum battery life of 20 hours. I don't know how the display compares to other models but this one can display up to 4 data fields simultaneously. I think there are 4 different displays you can scroll through. It will take me some time to figure out what I want to display on them and how many displays I want to use. The only display configuration I know I want displays: current pace, current heart rate, average pace, distance. I will need one with timers/clocks too which I may set up with: lap time, clock time, time so far, and distance. I will figure that out as I run more and think of data that I wish I could see during the run.

It has a configurable auto-lap option which I set to be every 0.25 miles. This is configurable to anything you want. I also had it display lap-pace. My idea was to get a current pace that is an average of the current lap so it would give me my pace that is an average of up to my previous quarter mile but not as 'instantaneous' as just displaying current pace. I didn't like it making a new lap so often so I'll switch it back to every mile. Like I wrote earlier, I'll figure this out as I run more. So far, so good.

--Mark