I Love my Garmin

Posted on July 10, 2014, by cruisingrunner

Seriously, I love it. Tim bought it for me many years ago, in fact, I think I have one of the very first models, because the face of it is a large rectangle that covers my entire wrist. These days the new ones look no different than sport watches. I’ve occasionally looked at the newer models, and I’m sure even once or twice one has found its way into my Amazon shopping cart, but I always resist in the end. Mine is still in perfect working order and I’ve come to have a bit of affection for its obnoxious size. Like it’s some sort of badge of honor.

I love my Garmin because I love to know EXACTLY how far I ran and EXACTLY how fast. I also love to know EXACTLY my pace any time I want. I was always pretty obsessive about it in that I would pause it for things like traffic lights or any reason I was going to have to stop for more than, oh, about a second. I certainly wouldn’t want any bad data biasing my pace results.

When I started running recently out here on the islands, I intentionally decided not to use the Garmin right away. I knew I would be slow, and I didn’t want to get discouraged right off the bat before I fell back in love with running. It was a good strategy, because I know I’ve been slow. I finally couldn’t take it anymore and I used it for my two runs on Maupiti. The first day I ran just over 10 min miles, the second day just under. Slow, but not discouragingly slow. I wore the Garmin for yesterday’s run, but I understandably forgot to pause it when I was confronting the pack of dogs, so pace info for that run isn’t exactly accurate. I’ve decided I’m going to stick with about a 3-mile run for a while, maybe until I can run 9 min miles again. Three miles is a good distance since it’s short and doesn’t take up too much of the day, and I don’t have to bother myself with carrying water and snacks. It will be fun to watch my pace progress over time too.

There’s one more reason I love my Garmin. I found that buried in one of the menus it will actually display your current latitude and longitude in degrees and minutes. So, it’s now become our backup GPS device should anything ever happen to our electronics. It’s perfect since the battery lasts a very long time and it’s small and portable. It even has a home in our ditch bag now. So, there you go. Good for running, good for cruising emergencies.

-D.