The White Heat of Technology

Day:         14
Distance: 13.8 km
Time:        1:14:18 secs

The first run of the new year was done back in Essex. As a starting point I based the run on the Billericay 10k route and then improvised an additional 4km so as to meet the goal of 75 mins as laid down by my training plan.

I decided to use the Run Keeper App on my wife's iphone to track my run for the first time. Up until this point I'd been mapping my runs, after I'd done them, on http://www.walkjogrun.net/. WJR is a good website but as my training plan calls for progressively longer distances it is taking me longer to map out the route I've followed, so I figured that an app that tracks my run as I do it was just what I needed. All that was required was for me to get a decent GPS signal, press start and then head off for 75 minutes of running.

As I was running round I began to reappraise my self-assigned status as a Luddite (see definition in the very first post on this blog). Here I was running round with an ipod strapped to my left arm listening to a playlist I'd created, with an iphone in my pocket measuring my every move thanks to the wonders of GPS and at the end of it I'd be adding my own voice to 'blogosphere' in order to record what I had done. All in all, I was feeling pretty proud of myself. At the dawn of the second decade of the 21st Century I had finally made my peace with the technological advances that I had held in contempt until very recently.

The air of post-Millennial self-satisfaction came to an abrupt halt though when I retrieved the iphone from my pocket and discovered that Run Keeper had recorded just 3 seconds of the 4,458 that I'd been running for! Apparently, I'd left a crucial stage out at the beginning - I hadn't locked the damn phone. Luckily, I was wearing a running watch throughout so I knew how long the run had taken but I still needed to turn to walkjogrun to track the route I'd followed.

Clearly, giving up my Luddite ways is going to take some time yet.