Back Out There

Today I woke up tired and with a headache, after a bad night’s sleep. Oddly, though, I still felt the urge to go out for my first jog since the Bristol Half. I’ve been meaning to get back out pounding the streets for a couple of weeks now, but my change in routine — I quit my day job — seemed to hinder that, rather than helping it.

As you might expect, for the first jog in weeks when I was tired and headachy, it didn’t go that well. I wanted to nip up to Clifton Village and get some lunch, so I went up Bridge Valley Road (now fully open again after being closed to traffic, and occasionally even pedestrians, for many months.) This was clearly too much of a challenge for my unhappy body and brain, so after plodding all the way up the hill I was pretty exhausted. I slowed to a walk for a while to recover, then picked up the pace again, then dropped back to a walk.

Screen Shot 2011 10 12 at 14 13 30I was also a bit annoyed by RunKeeper. Some releases ago, RunKeeper just seems to have stopped being able to keep a good GPS lock. It doesn’t seem to be related to my phone, because (a) I started with the phone that worked fine with RunKeeper for years, and (b) because of a headphone connector problem, I’ve just had my phone replaced by Apple for a new one, and RunKeeper isn’t working properly on the new one, either.

Today, RunKeeper was completely rubbish at tracking me, and by the end of my 5K run, had recorded me doing a random 7.5K track with lots of random spikes out to the sides of my real route, and an average pace of under 3min/km — I wish!

Luckily, my Garmin Forerunner 305 always seems to be beautifully accurate — I guess the GPS hardware is simply better than in the iPhone — so I’ve just been uploading tracks from that to replace the rubbish RunKeeper-recorded ones (here’s today’s). It’s a shame I can’t rely on RunKeeper any more to give me voice prompts (like telling me when to turn around if I’m halfway through a jog down the Portway), though.

Maybe the GPS is better in the iPhone 4S, which I’m hoping to upgrade to at some point soon…