I occasionally search the Internet for friends to see what their up to in life and two days ago I ran into Jonathan Kalmes website http://smthing.info. Jonathan is a friend I met through my ex-brother-in-law in Orlando decades ago and we had quite a lot in common so we would hang out on occasion, especially after we both ended up in D.C. (I now live in St. Petersburg, he's still in D.C.). Anyway, the reason I decided to finally start my blog is I have started smthing :-D that I swore I would never do... let me explain.
I was reading through Jonathan's blogs and realized he had started running. This is odd because I was pretty sure that Jonathan and I had similar distain for abusing our bodies in that way, there are other ways to abuse our bodies and they were much more enjoyable. As I read the blogs he mentioned his need for instant gratification and that we was a tech geek... did I mention how much alike we were? Well he had found a device by Garmin called the Forerunner 305 and that it gave him tons of data that we was able to analyze immediately following his runs so I hoped in the car and drove to Best Buy and got one. Well, actually I got the Garmin 405. I think it's basically the same thing, just more watch like.
It took me a while to get out of Best Buy, always seems to happen when I go to Circuit City, CompUSA or Best Buy, I ended up with several more items than my intended Forerunner... Canon 50D, two IS lenses, 580 flash, etc. but that'll have to wait until another post. I got home and played with my kids secretly excited for them to go to bed so I could play with my new toy. Once they were down for the night I 'tried' to configure the ANT, which is a usb wireless tranceiver for the Forerunner. Unfortunately it took 15 minutes or so to get Vista 64 to connect to the Forerunner, ultimately I had to set the shortcut to 'xp service pack 2' compatibility to get it to work.
At 9:30pm or so I took off for my first run since high school I believe. I ran .64 miles in just under 5 minutes. It was my first time but I'm hooked. Today is day two and I just ran the same 'course' and cut 19 seconds off my time from yesterday. I'm still learning how to analyze all the data but I'm going to continue running and as I see progress I'll post some of the data to my blog.
BTW, it wasn't all Jonathan's doing, on Turkey Day my son Nathan aged 7 begged me to run the Pinellas Turkey Trot 5k with him. Both my boys are big into sports and Nathan loves to run and I knew I couldn't do it. He did end up going with my wife (she's more capable than me :-D). He was clearly disappointed that I did run with him and Vera had to walk part of the way and he wanted to run. I promised him that I would work hard to get in shape so I could run a 5k with him. Apparently they have another one coming up for Christmas here locally, I doubt I'll be able to make it by then but I'm going to give it a try. I'll let you know how it goes.
Shane