Pragerblog

If you’ve been following my running commentary via Facebook status updates — and who hasn’t? — you know that I’d run from “never did a mile without stopping” to 3.6 miles in just under 3 months. I was bragging, but was also amazed.

Turns out the numbers were fraudulent.

My measuring stick was a shoe dongle + software in my iPod, and calibration is a bitch. The first time I calibrated it, I was on a treadmill at the gym. I have no idea if I did it well, but the readout said it took. Sometime later, I reset the entire iPod, but the device said it was still calibrated, so I didn’t redo it.

A couple of days ago, I started running on a different section of the Minuteman bike trail, and noticed that someone had painted kilometer markings on the pavement. So I matched what the iPod was saying to it, and found that what should have been .6 miles was .8. That is no small change!

Now, it could be the kilometer painter is wrong, but I was able to compare against two different marked stretches, and they appeared the same distance, which is not to say they’re accurate, but at least they’re consistent.

My rough calculations tell me that that 3.6 was actually only 2.7. And, what I thought were 10:30 paces are actually in the 12s! These more modest numbers makes sense for a 51-year-old of decent-at-best conditioning with no background of running, but they are disappointing nevertheless.

One of the features of the software is that when you set a new “best,” Joan Benoit Samuelson, Lance Armstrong, or Tiger Woods congratulates you, and I’ve been hearing from them with practically every run. Now, of course, it will be some time before I hear from these new best friends — who knows how long it will be before I run an actual 3.7.

I’m going to feel the effects of this inflation in other ways, too. My last time out, on Friday, I ran longer than I ever had. I don’t know the numbers, but I had run the same route previously and started walking at an earlier point on the return. But I still felt like a wimp when I heard/saw the number, since it was so much less than I’d “done” before.

Meanwhile, though it’s a marvelous consumer trifle, the pedometer doesn’t measure at all what it’s like to be a middle-aged runner — or person who runs, anyway — after being imprisoned by fat and food addiction for my first 30-plus years. That feels pretty good.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 18th, 2009 at 8:32 am and is filed under Eating issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.