Garmin Woes

My slow but steady running comeback has been going much better this week.  I'm taking my time building up mileage.  I'm pretty sure my next race will probably be Big Sur in April so I've got lots of time to build a solid base.

I signed up to be a volunteer at the Turkey Trail Trot on Thanksgiving.  At first I was going to run it, but remembered the creed to try to cut back on these race fees.  So I figured it would be just as fun to volunteer.  It's just going to be me and Mario this Thanksgiving and while he's awesome company I don't think he's going to squeak out "Happy Thanksgiving!"  So it will be nice to get to say this to people in the flesh.  If anyone in the area is running it, let me know so I can look for you!

I have some sad news about my favorite running pal, Garmin.  The last month or so I've had an inkling that the battery life wasn't quite what it used to be.  For a while I was running almost 50 mile weeks and I only had to charge Garmin every week and a half or so.  Lately I've been piddling around 3-8 mi weeks and it seems like Garmin dies every week.  But I guess since I was running so infrequently lately I haven't really been able to digest this back-of-my-mind concern.

Yesterday I headed out planning to run 2-2.5 miles.  I powered Garmin up and it immediately flashed me a "low battery" warning.  Once long ago I was out in the middle of a 10 mi run when Garmin told me at about mile 6 that the battery was low.  I was so upset because I had no clue of my exact mileage where I was running without it.  And I was determined to run 10 miles exactly that day.  Luckily Garmin lasted another 45 minutes and I was able to do the 10 mi run with Garmin faithfully reporting all the vital stats.

So when Garmin told me he was feeling sort of low on power I figured it would be okay because the run would only take about 20 minutes.  But Garmin flat out DIED on me 7 minutes into the run.  I was doing a quick out-and-back run in Golden Gate Park and wasn't quite sure where the 1 mi turnaround was.  I do know where the 1.5 mi turnaround so ran to that point before turning back.  So the great news is I had an awesome 3 mi run (which I wasn't expecting to attempt so soon) but the bad news is I am pretty sure Garmin is on the fritz.  I'm fairly certain I charged it very recently.

So I charged Garmin yesterday and made a note of it in my running log and will keep using it 'til it dies to figure out exactly how much battery life I'm getting nowadays.  The sad thing is I checked yesterday and I bought Garmin at the end of October 2007.  This means my 1 year warranty expired about 2 weeks ago!  So instead of being able to resolve this for free, according to the website I would now need to shell out $90 for repairs.  Grr.  I am so mad at myself for not really paying attention to the flashing red lights in my mind weeks ago.

I am really hoping that since I've been running so infrequently lately, I think I'm getting less mileage out of it but in reality more actual time has elapsed between charges.  But I think this is just wishful thinking.  So sad.