Beginners guide to running a marathon

Brooks L.S.D. Jacket II review

I was looking to buy a Northface better than naked jacket but couldn't find one locally. REI just had the cool jacket at 130 bucks. While I was there, I noticed the Brooks L.S.D. jacket II. This is a crazy light jacket. Very thin fabric thats wind proof and has a water repellent with a hood. It can fold in to its own pocket which is cool and the pocket then has clips to attach it to a hydration pack or similar.

I haven't worn jackets much simply because I get very hot. Even in 35F weather in Minnesota, I found that wearing my north face hyvent jacket, I'd get too hot very quickly. So, I was looking for something super light/breathable and I could wear without getting hot.

I ran in it for the first time this morning. The temperature was high 30s with a wind. I gotta say, it was really good. I stopped the wind nicely and I didn't get hot at all. Very impressed. It's also 75 bucks instead of 130 which makes it a great value.

I bought a medium jacket. Thats my usual size, with just a running top under it, it fits fine but I could see myself straining it if I streched my upper back or if I put it on carelessly. Across the shoulders it's a little tight with a little extension. But, during the run it felt the right size so I don't think I'll change it for a large. Anyways, thats the great part of buying with REI, I can always change it or replace it if anything happens.

The materiel is very thin so you need to be careful with the jacket or I think you'll tear it but that said, during my trail run this morning, I'm pretty sure I got grabbed by brush and branches and it survived that pretty well.

So, overall, pretty cool.

Outdoor Technology Bluetooth Tags Review

A friend gave me a set of Outdoor Technologies Bluetooth Tags as a christmas present. They are a stereo with mic bluetooth set with a cord connecting the left and right units. They come with hooks also which hold them in your ears very well.

Battery life they aren't great 3-4 hours which is marginal for long runs but fine on shorter ones or commutes. Sound wise, they are pretty good and are similar to 50 buck in ear buds from other vendors I've tried.

I ran with them this morning on a 1:45 trail run and was pretty pleased with them. Very comfortable, I forget they were even there. If it rained then I'd say they would be toast but for dry stuff, they seem ok.

They look a big dorky as the dog tag style generally has them hanging from your ears at an angle which I don't find flattering.

Signal wise, they work well running but with my iphone 4s in a fanny pack thats over my butt, if I look to the left then the signal breaks up and you can't hear any more. Looking forwards and to the right doesn't cause an issue. I suspect with the iphone on my arm, it might be ok.

But, so far so good. For dry and indoor shorter runs (20 miles or less) they seem like a good bet for me.

Garmin 610, 5 months in with FBA

Since I got First Beat Athlete software, the Garmin 610 seems to be behaving itself now. The kcals and TE look right and agree with the FBA software mostly.

The FBA software has me at activity level 7.5 now after 3 weeks of collecting data from runs. This mornings trail run was a 3.2 according to FBA and the same on the garmin 610 so thats good.

Garmin 610 wireless transfers failing

I was using my 610 with my iMac and the ANT stick is plugged in to a hub on my desk. I never had a problem with wireless transfer besides waiting for it to start when ever it felt like it. I'm now using first beat athlete which doesn't work on a Mac so I use my game PC in my gym. The ant stick is plugged directly in to the back of my PC tower and I was resting the 610 on the desk so there was no clear line of sight between the two.

Transfer seemed slow and failed at least half the time. This was frustrating since this was one of the new things I actually liked about the 610 compared with my 305 which nearly always failed transfers with a device time out.

So, I tried moving the 610 to resting on top of the back of the tower. Maybe 3 inches from the ANT stick and the transfer speed seems to have doubled and the transfer hasn't failed yet. I'll keep trying this but I'm hoping this fixes my problem once and for all.

Garmin 610 and First Beat Athlete

The first beat athlete software came out today. I've been very disappointed with my Garmin 610 running the 2.6 firmware. The TE capability basically doesn't work. I've had the watch for 3 months and I'm still getting ridiculous TE numbers. Like 5.0 after a mile of easy running or that I burned 600 calories during a 1:53 half marathon. It'd be funny if the watch didn't cost 350 dollars...

So, today the first beat athlete software finally came out. I installed it on my PC (Mac people, you're out of luck!). It detected the ANT agent and let me configure it to capture R-R data. The 610 by default doesn't emit R-R data which is necessary to do most of the sophisticated analytics with the data. Enabling R-R means there is more data being stored and it takes longer to transfer. A good trade off in my opinion.

The athlete software asked me for my data such as age/sex/max hr/activity level. Yes, I entered my activity level. Man, that was soo good after 3 months of frustration watching the 610 utterly fail to figure it out. It imported the old data files from the watch and figured out a new activity level based on those.

Next, the data was pushed to the watch. This is a big deal. Now, you can influence the configuration for TE and push it to the watch immediately rather than wait aimlessly for the watch to never figure it out. Pushing the data to the watch did not go smoothly however. I ended up having to reset the watch (erase it) in order to allow the receiving of the FIT file to succeed. It kept failing prior to this.

I then went for a run and the TE seemed much better. The calories burned made much more sense. I'll do more runs now with the 610 and over the next week post what happens.

I imported the last 90 days of runs in to the athlete software but it's all basically useless. Without R-R, athlete cant do anything with the data. This is pretty annoying. How hard would it have been for garmin simply push R-R data out of the thing from the beginning. Did we really need to wait till now to let a non garmin, a 3rd party, piece of software enable this capability? Seriously?

The bottom line for me right now is the Garmin 610 TE capability is broken if you just have the watch. You need the first beat software to configure it correctly so that the numbers it produces make sense.

Garmin 610 on 2.6 firmware likes to reboot itself

Just finished a session which transferred ok to daily mile/garmin connect etc unlike yesterday. All looked good till it just beeped now and rebooted itself. This thing needs new a firmware level.

This trick with syncing seems to be just stop and reset the session and then walk up to your computer and then it seems to sync within a minute or two. If you're outside this window then I can't predict when it will do it other than within a 5-10 minute period of sitting down with the computer and watching it.

Maybe, if you stare, it will sync faster, I don't know...

More garmin connect syncing weirdness

I did a half marathon on the treadmill yesterday. The session is good on my garmin 610 history page, distance/page/cals/hr and so on. All looks fine. I synced with the ant agent on my iMac. Looked at the session in garmin training center and everything is fine. I imported it to dailymile and everything is fine.

I then imported to garmin connect and a 2 hour session is now 5 minutes long, 0 miles, no HR, it's just all crazy corrupt. I tried deleting it and reimporting it but no dice, still all corrupt. For now, I manually edited the session on garmin connect so at least the mileage and pace is correct.

I don't think it's the watch or the ant agent as everything is fine except on garmin connect.

Garmin 610 Training Effect (TE) goes crazy

Just when I thought the Garmin 610 was adjusting to my level of fitness. On Tuesday, the TE finally reflected a 'reasonable' value of 3.8 for my run. Today, it was literally jumping on 0.5 chunks while I was watching. I ended up at 5.0 after about 1.5 miles at 145 heart rate. No idea what got in to its little head. I tried stopping the 'session' on the watch and resetting the session and then restarting it but it did the same thing again.

It did hang during a transfer on Tuesday and I reset it (soft reset) to eventually get the transfer to complete. But, after this reading, it's just ridiculous. All the settings are still correct, weight, height etc. All normal. So, it seems like the internal settings for calculating TE got corrupted.

UPDATE:

I contacted garmin support and they responded the same day. Basically, all they offered was that the watch settings had gotten corrupted and I had to do a hard reset. This is a multi-button press effort. But, the problem now is the watch is back to square zero in terms of estimating my activity level so the TE will once again be way off. This is a major pain. It took two weeks to get it to figure me out and now it'll take another two weeks to do it again. I wish there was a way to see the current estimate and then allow me to reenter it if required.

Problems wireless syncing my garmin 610

With my old garmin 305 watch I had a lot of problems syncing over USB. Device time out exceptions were very common. It seems that the garmin 610 alleviated these problems but comes with a different set of its own problems.
My main issue is I need to wait a long time before the wireless sync is started automatically and there doesn't seem to be a way to manually start the sync. There is a way to tell the watch to upload a session but it doesn't seem to have any effect. The watch still seems to sync when it feels like it.
I'm on the latest firmware which is level 2.6 right now but I still see the watch hanging occasionally during transfers once they start. This requires a soft reset to recover.
So all in all it's a mixed bag. Yes, data transfer is better in some respects but it's not perfect yet.

Garmin 610 watchstrap is proving a problem

I really like garmin 610. But the watch strap is beginning to be a problem. It seems to be stretching and looked like it was going to break off the watch this morning. I managed to pop it back on but it's weakened now and seems softer. I'll give it another week and maybe I'll take it back to REI for a replacement. Doesn't seem durable enough to use every day as normal watch