so with five weeks left to got before my race, i seem to have developed some sort of injury to my right quad, but i still managed to kick it into high gear today for some interval training. i thought i’d blog a bit about the garmin forerunner 50. (it is a non-gps based wireless device). i have the version with a foot pod pedometer. i grabbed it while in seattle and used it to clock my pace around green lake while i was there. it works wonderfully as a watch based pedometer for pace and distance. it doesn’t however, work so happily with mac or linux or bsd (yet. apparently mac software will be out at the end of this year). secondly, for doing something like my interval training of today, it isn’t so handy. it isn’t easy to switch between miles and meters for speed work, neither is it easy to track “x distance in x time” because the timer function only shows in timer mode which doesn’t let you watch the distance scrolling by. also, as far as i can tell, when you use the lap function while training, it doesn’t show you the current distance of the current lap. i could be wrong about this, but it certainly isn’t intuitive in the design. i was looking forward to the new garmin forerunner 405 gps based watches coming out in june, but if they are as stupid as this watch at interval training i think i will skip them completely. i hope garmin surprises me in a positive way. oh, and some way to get my data off the watch without running windows would be fabulous as well.

[photo: me running the johnstone trail near inverness, california this march]