My Garmin experience (Read 454 times)

I've noticed that even on easy runs I find myself looking at my wrist very frequently, checking pace, chacking HR. I'm trying to break myself of that habit. I do find it useful to record information so I don't want to just let it collect dust. I set it up so one of the data screens shows only elapsed time. Yesterday I was going to run a basic tempo run, 10 min warmup, 20 min tempo, 10 min cooldown. Piece of cake, right? Uh, no. It seems I need to get a little more experience what "comfortably hard" means. It's easy to run an 8:25 on the TM or on the road when I stare at my wrist for 60% of the time but it seems I've become extremely dependant on that feedback. I ran the bulk of the first tempo mile a solid 25 seconds faster than my 5k race pace, but that's ok because I slowed enough when I got a bit tired to the first mile was only 9 seconds faster than what Daniels claims my tempo pace should be. Duh.

I had a similar issue. I broke myself of it when I got injured. My garmin was full and my usb screwed up so I had to delete an old run just to get a new one in. Dealing with that and trying to run at a snails pace without pain I just ran without it or just a watch. Finally when I got back up to what I thought was my normal pace where I wore it again, I realized that I was running faster than before. I find that now my pace is really dependent on how I feel and my peeks at my garmin are more of an observation so I can tell what pace I'm running in my head. Try running a few weeks without it. Do your normal runs and tell yourself "Well, this feels like an easy run...ok, this feels like a tempo...oh jeez...that's close to racing..."