A taste of spring

A taste of spring arrived today. Mid-50sF, low humidity, bright sunshine, a mild breeze, just a wonderful day. Ran 6 miles from the house down to and onto the W&OD and then back.

I had all the gizmos of my Suunto working. I learned that the heart rate monitor strap needs to be tighter than I had been wearing it. Turns out that when I am breathing hard and I fully exhale, the shape of my deflated chest causes momentary loss of contact with the strap sensors and that causes a false or no heart rate reading. So I stopped and tightened it up and that seemed to solve that problem.

The GPS pod (about the diameter of a large-ish store-bought cookie) comes with an arm strap, but i found that the pod will lose coverage quite easily that way. When Suunto says that the pod works best when pointed at the sky, they mean it. Next I'm going to try the pod laced into my shoes. If that doesn't produce good results, I'm going to secure it to my hat. It might look a little odd, but it won't get any better reception on any other part of my body. There's a running hat I might get which comes with a little pouch to hold some gel shots, and that should be just the size to hold this pod also. So it would just sit up there and receive data. Nothing to be done about trees and other obstacles, but there is no clearer line-of-sight than the top of my head.

The watch continues to function flawlessly as a watch, also. No one has said anything about it. I thought for sure someone would come up to me by now and say "Peter, you haven't worn a watch since I've known you, and now you have this one all the time. what's up with that?" but no one has. So as I usually do, I don't mention it unless someone asks.