Garmin beginner and software pains

I'm still in Garmin 1st grade. I haven't learned the buttons by position yet. I mean the lap and start/stop buttons. After stopping for some water this morning we were going to take off at a fast pace. I took off and meant to push lap but hit the start/stop button. I was wondering why my distance wasn't updating. Ugh. I hit the start/stop several times and then hit the lap button. I'll learn. This was about 5 miles into a 9 mile run when we picked up the pace. I looked at my splits for those 4 miles (Franklin Bridge to Ford Bridge on the east side) and they were 7:34, 7:48 (St. Thomas hill here), 7:23, and 6:56 to finish. A good solid run for me.

An hour ago I had the Garmin linkup and upload to garminconnect.com via a wireless USB attachment. I logged into the website and saw my workout was NOT there. Huh? I looked at the status of the Garmin software and see there was a problem uploading to the Garmin server. Ugh. I have a setting in the software to delete the exercise from my Garmin after uploading it. You see what happened.... the software uploaded my data and then deleted it from my Garmin before verifying the upload was good. Oh well, I changed the setting and I'll deleted the data off the Garmin myself from now on.

Next challenge.... figuring out how to get a quick satellite lock after stepping outside to run.

--Mark

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