My Garmin

I was a little out of sorts earlier. Because just like that, my Garmin stopped working. I had turned it on and then put it back in the charging cradle. When I pulled it back out to head off to run, it shut off and wouldn't come back on. I looked for some sort of reset button, but it doesn't have one. I tried a couple different combinations of button pressing to find the hard reset. But nothing worked and the screen remained dark.

It was 5:30 and I promised Mary I'd be home by 7:00. So I had to get going. I grabbed my old school sports watch. The watch is so 2 years ago when I could barely pull off 3 miles. But at least I could get an elapsed time. That would have to be good enough.

But things where not good. In fact, they kinda sucked. First off, I had to remember to manually start and stop the watch at traffic lights. The Garmin does that automatically. I remembered to hit the start/stop button every time except once, but once is enough to throw everything off. I forgot to hit start at one particular intersection and didn't notice until 1 minute and 36 seconds later. I know that it was 1 minute and 36 seconds because later I drove over to the intersection, parked my car, and re-timed the segment.

I have a thing about accuracy.

I like (and have become very used to) knowing what my pace, heart rate, accumulated distance, and elapsed time is whenever I want. And even though I have this route memorized to the foot, it still felt wrong. I didn't have my training partner.

I was alone. Because today there where not 3 satellites in a geosynchronous orbit somewhere overhead quietly working away keeping me data rich. And I would not have anything to upload into my training log (even though I rarely use that data for anything useful anyway).

I used to proclaim, somewhat proudly, that I was not dependent on technology. I now realize that is complete bulls**t. After all, I almost had a meltdown today. I never leave the house without my Iphone. I have not touched a book since I got a Kindle. And I use AOL Instant Messenger & Skype, at the same time!!!

Then there is this blog. Lately I have been installing every 3rd party blog aggregating widget I can find. I can't go to bed without looking at Google Analytics first. Blogging has created a whole new community, and I want my 40 acres and a mule. Or at least a mule avatar.

Fortunately, the Garmin is working again. I did a Google search for "Garmin 305 will not turn on" and easily found the right combination of keys to press. And by the way, I didn't get the information off the Garmin website. Somebody's blog came up first.