How to misread a Garmin

On Tuesday morning, I had arranged to run with Angela at 6am. You may will think that this is a dumb time to get up when you're on holidays, but it fits with Angela's work, and it was only 24 degrees and 10,003% humidity at that time. Dread to think of what it got to later. The unfortunate part was that my last thought before I went to sleep was "I must get up in time for Angela". As many of you would know, this is commonly known as A Bad Thing.

I woke at 1am thinking "time to get up. Hmm. Why is it so dark...". I woke at 1:30am, thinking... you get the drift. Eventually I got up at 5am and read untill 6. All this was made even worse by the fact that I had only gone to bed at 12:30! I'm pretty sure that I had a nana-nap on Tuesday afternoon :-) For all that, it was a very pleasant run up around Thornleigh; 10.4k at 6:10 pace.

I was unable to run this morning because of a doctor's appointment, so I planned to do it in the (hopefully) cool of the evening tonight. Watching the ABC weather at 7:30 and they noted that there was a big storm front coming across the Blue Mountains. I had a look at the weather radar (very useful site), and they weren't kidding. On the basis that a) I needed the k's, and b) it's easier to start in the dry than in the wet, I grabbed my things and got out there, intending to do 12k easy pace.

I've said before that I like running in the rain, and tonight only reinforced it. Once you're wet, you can't get any wetter, and as long as you have a hat on, the drips don't run in your eyes. I did, however, discover a major problem... My eyes are not world class at the best of times, but at night in the rain, I've zilch chance of reading the smaller fonts on the Garmin. Now for some reason, I don't have distance as one of the big font readouts (must fix that), but I could see just enough to work out that the first digit in the distance cell was a zero. In other words, I hadn't done 10k yet. Seemed odd. I thought that I was going faster than that, but with waterlogged shoes, etc, I guess.... Instead of heading home, I added an extra block to at least get it up over the 11k, but noticed further on that the leading digit was still stubbornly zero.

I'm sure that you're all way ahead of me by now. When I got home and got into some decent light, I realised that I'd been looking at pace, not distance! Glad that didn't get up over 10 :-) It turned out that I'd actually done almost 14K at 5:40 pace. Important job before Sunday - set up Distance in the big font on one of the display pages.

I finally received an email from tigerangel tonight (she's been out of contact since Sunday night). She's had an "awesome" time with the kids on the camp. About half the Oz team (including the leader) were very ill (might have been from eating spiders) which just meant that everyone else had to step up and do stuff that they wouldn't have thought possible in their own strength. Unfortunately, TA has since fallen prey to the same lurgy, so she's not expecting a particularly comfortable flight home. I think that she'll have some great stories to tell just as soon as she can get her head up off the pillow to tell them.

sfG

p.s. I should add - thanks for all your supportive comments. I appreciate them. 100% of the time when I'm not running, I know for certain that I'll be able to finish the marathon. The thing that I have to get sorted is that I tend to lose concentration during races, and that's when my mind starts playing tricks on me. It happened again at SMC last month. It'll be interesting to see whether I can deal with it better this week. Evonne Goolagong's coach used to say that she had a bad habit of "going walkabout" half way through matches. It's probably the only thing that she and I have in common :-))