Midweek Run - 6.2 miles

It's after midnight. YEAH! IT'S AFTER MIDNIGHT! I'll be paying for this at 4:30 when the alarm goes off.

Anyway, today's run went well. In the name of experimentation, I ran without the HRM strap.



Here be splyts.



Mile 1: 8:28.49
Mile 2: 8:24.13
Mile 3: 8:41.95
Mile 4: 8:40.49
Mile 5: 9:07.48
Mile 6: 8:45.11
.20 Mi: 1:44.19 (8:48/mi)

6.2 miles, 53:51.41, 8:41/mi, 776 calories burned.

Or was it?

On Tuesday I ran the same route, at just about the same exact pace, in the same time within 5 seconds. The thing is, I wore the strap, and you know what the calories burned was? 778 calories! Today was 776.

The evidence obviously points to the fact that the Garmin Forerunner 305, as cool as it might be, doesn't even bother to use the HRM strap for calculating calories burned. It calculates it the same way an elliptical machine or treadmill calculates, which is using age, weight, time, and distance.

The Garmin 50 is the same way. I tried wearing it in the gym during a weight workout to not only plot my heart rate over time, but calculate calories burned as well. The only problem was, since I wasn't using the foot pod at the time, nothing was recorded for calories burned!

This is mind numbingly stupid. Apparently all the Garmin units are this way, even the Forerunner 405. So here you have, in the case of the 405, a $299 unit that can't even show accurate calories burned!

There is hope, however. Since the Forerunner keeps all the data, there's a running heart rate for every reading the thing makes. Garmin Training Center doesn't let you do anything with that data, but SportTracks has plugin capabilities. While it doesn't have this capability, it would seem to me that it would be a simple matter to take that heart rate data, plug it into a calories burned formula for each GPS or foot pod reading, then output the more accurate number at the end.

In the meantime, it's back to the Reebok HRM that I bought for $20 on Woot.com. While it doesn't output to the computer, it does calculate calories burned based on heart rate, not time & distance.

Oh, and another thing: my thigh muscle's been twitching for the last hour. I'm going to bed now.

Weight Workout

Today was gym day, I did a normal MWF weight workout.

Warmup, 30 secs ea, 3 circuits
* Jumping Jacks
* Split Jacks
* Squats
* Lunges
* Mountain Climbers

Workout
* Multidirectional Lunge, 2x20x65lbs
* Underhand-grip Dumbell Row, 2x20x25lbs
* Single-leg Bridge, 3x10 (both sides)
* Serratus Dip, 2x20, 1x10
* Plank, 3x10
* Hanging Scapular Retraction, 2x10, 1x7

45 minutes, 290 calories burned

After the workout, I ran a mile on the treadmill to see if my calibration made any difference. It did, but I think I need to recalibrate. While I ran a half mile to measure distance, the distance back was .57 miles, which could have made a difference.

The reason I'm suspecting it is this: according to the Garmin, I ran a mile. According to the treadmill, it was 1.09 miles. I had the treadmill set to 7.5mph, or an 8 minute mile. According to the Garmin, I ran 1 mile in 9 minutes! So something's obviously up there.

1 mile, 9 minutes, 125 calories burned.

Total calories burned: 415.

Midweek Run - 6.2 miles

Today was my first run after my FAIL on Saturday. It went really well, in fact I had the best time I've had on any of my 6-mile midweek runs. Not as fast as the turkey trot, of course, but I can't complain.

I even had a couple setbacks that didn't work too much against me. Traffic was uncooperative, I had to stop a couple times before crossing streets. Also in Mile 5 I had to stop so I could wipe the sweat out of my eyes. With both of those, I still managed to get my best midweek time.



Splits
Mile 1: 8:14.64
Mile 2: 8:19.53
Mile 3: 8:48.39
Mile 4: 8:40.42
Mile 5: 9:03.60
Mile 6: 8:53.65
.20 mi: 1:46.43 (8:57/mi)

6.2 miles, 53:46.66, 8:40/mi, 778 calories burned



Tomorrow it's back to the gym. I'll also try to fit in a couple miles on the treadmill to see how the newly-calibrated Forerunner works out.

Turkey Trot Pictures!

The "official" Turkey Trot pictures are now online, and once again, I look like I'm dying. What's the deal with that, do you guys have this problem as well? Seriously.



There were actually a few decent pictures, one of which I'm using as an avatar. But man, I was making some nasty faces.

The rest of the pictures (of me and all three of my kids) are here.