LSD beats OCD

Today I had the opportunity to do a semi-regular long, slow distance run. Running long is a double whammy. You have to set aside several hours for the run itself, plus several additional hours of lying on the couch afterwards if you’re pushing your limits on distance as I did today.

The advice on these runs is to start slow and finish fast. But, no matter how slow I start, I usually get slower and slower as the run goes on. Today I was determined to go out so slow that I’d have something left to really push with in the final hour.

Enter my Garmin watch. It can display heart rate, pace, time, distance, lap time, and a number of other things. It can also do “workouts”. For example, if you want to run intervals, it will time the intervals for you and beep at the end of each time period.

There are two fundamental problems with this watch. First, while it can display a lot of information, it can only display a few numbers on the screen at a time. So you end up having to page through the screens to get all the information. I have the same problem with my Ford Escape. In that, you have to hit the “info” button to cycle between the trip odometer, MPG readout, miles to empty, etc.

In both cases, I get too fascinated with the numbers and OCD makes me end up cycling through them, which takes my focus away from other things such as watching out for oncoming trucks (conveniently, that applies to both running and driving).

The second problem with the Garmin is that it can do a lot of wonderful things, but it never does them quite the way I expect. Case in point: Today I was trying to start out slow, slower than I can actually “run”. Anytime I need to run an average pace slower than about 11 minutes, I use the run/walk method promoted by Jeff Galloway. So in the middle of my run today, I decided to use the interval timer of the watch to let me know when to run and when to walk.

Now, when you do a “workout” with this watch, and the workout completes, the timer stops. However, if you simply hit the start button again, you continue timing from where the workout ended. So, it would make sense that if the timer were already running, and you started a workout, it would just add on to whatever time had already been counted by the watch, right? Nope. It resets the time and distance to 0 when you start a workout. Oops, I’ve now divided my long run into a series of smaller runs that need to be all added up to get the total time and distance.

So here I am, running along and thinking about how to use an Excel spreadsheet to do the totals for me. But you know what? After a few miles, you cease to care about such things. All that really matters for future reference is that I ran approximately X miles in T time. It’s probably even slightly OCD to be keeping a log of my runs, but a certain amount is called for so you can track progress and figure out what works and what doesn’t. But at some point, you just need to get out and run, and not worry about all these numbers.

Now, I will spend the rest of the evening trying not to figure out how many kilobytes of data per mile my watch generates.

Oh, and about the run itself. I did manage to hold my pace down to 12 minute miles or slower for the first 9 miles. Then I stopped at home to use the bathroom and refill my bottle, and then back out for some of the hardest sub-11 minute miles I’ve ever run. In years past, I never pushed myself this hard on a training run. However, that was before I ran a marathon and found out just how far you can push yourself and how much pain you can actually feel. Today was nothing compared to mile 24.