Technology is neat, but not dependable.

'The life that runs through everything in the universe is me"

Nothing gets me out of bed better than a beautiful sunny morning. Sure, it may be only 25 degrees out, but the sun just sings to me. With that inspiration, I got out of bed for my Saturday morning long run.

Prior to the run I downloaded the imapmyrun app for the iphone. Its features are to use GPS technologies to track your distance, time and pace. Neato, huh?

While on my run, I didn't look at it until I got to a point of where I was curious what distance I had covered. At this point it only said a measly 1.93 miles. Hmmmm....I should have been doubtful of it at this point. Because I have mapped out this run before with the website, and the website says that this point is 3 miles. I didn't dwell on it, just kept running.

And kept running.
and running...
and checked the GPS
and felt disappointed with the low mileage
but kept running...
and running....

One thing about this whole scenario that boggled me is the time it said that I took to run the low miles. It said that it took me over an hour to do 5 miles. My average 5 mile pace is 50 minutes, maybe a few minutes longer for a longer distance like 8, but definitely not over an hour. At this point I thought, "Well, maybe it's not accurate, I'll map it when I get home".

But the Jillian Michaels voice in me was saying, "Nuh-uh, you're running until that gadget says you've done 8 miles! Are you really going to do a half-marathon? Then you better finish these 8!"

So I ran for an hour and 47 minutes until the iphone claimed that I did 8 miles. When I stopped running, I looked at the route on my iphone, and I clearly saw the robbery it had on my miles. When running around a long bend, instead of running around the bend, the iphone thinks I run straight through the woods to the other side of the bend:



Darn technology, making me work harder! The good news is, is that I ran almost 9 miles. The bad news, GPS technology isn't quite there yet. It's pretty cool to think I only had 4 more miles to run to complete a half marathon.