randomosity

So in my quest to push the envel­ope and also save the world ;-) I ran the United Way 5K at Mac today. It is my second year run­ning. Last year I ran it after hav­ing run the Terry Fox 10K and very fool­ishly reasoned that 5K would be a cake­walk if I could run 10K. It’s simply half the dis­tance and there­fore quite eas­ily accom­plished. Yeah. 5K means you run a bloody sprint. So armed with this fore­know­ledge I paced myself well and was quite com­fort­able with it. It also gave me an oppor­tun­ity to get a nice long run’s data recor­ded via my <a href=“http://www.nike.com/nikeplus/” target=_blank” >Nike + pedometer. I have been using this abso­lutely cool device for the past few weeks and find the abil­ity to track my work outs a won­der­ful motiv­ator. However.….……

I star­ted off run­ning the 5K and in kicked my music. Great. I could hear it let me know as I was passing through km milestones…all seemed good. Run­ners star­ted off before walk­ers and were run­ning a longer course. After loop­ing back and the fol­low­ing the com­plete course I was approach­ing a big digital time sign at about 3.2km into the course. felt like I have been run­ning for longer, but I glanced at the iPod and Nike+ told me it was just over 3Km, so ran on by and star­ted to do another loop. Found it curi­ous that there were no longer race mar­shals on corners and was a little unclear as to how much of the course I had left to go. I knew that it was cer­tainly not a full course again, but was con­fused. So, after run­ning along the pre­vi­ous course I did some men­tal cal­cu­la­tions and figured I would make a drop over to the return course and it should be about 5K. So…ran for another 7 or eight minutes and was approach­ing the big digital board again. Decided to actu­ally ask the people there what was up. Here I dis­cover that the first time around I had done 5Km, but was prob­ably well between 7 and 8 km by this point. The iPod showed about 4.5km. When I read the instruc­tion on the Nike+ its sug­ges­ted that you *could* cal­ib­rate it, but it was not neces­sary. Let me tell you, it is clearly neces­sary. I got good exer­cise and a story out of it, and imme­di­ately after­wards went to the 400m track and did the cal­ib­ra­tion. I only wish I could not alter the pre­vi­ously stored inform­a­tion to reflect the fact that I had been pre­vi­ously run­ning much greater dis­tances than I realized ;-)

Moral of this story: tech­no­logy has its limits…I guess we (I) do need to be reminded of that every now and then.