Running the Orange County Marathon with the Garmin 205.


From: Charles Sayles [mailto:charles@csayles.com]
Sent: Tuesday, January 09, 2007 12:26 AM
To: Julie (the Flyer) Miller
Cc: Esquivel, Lorie; Jay (the rookie) Seashore; Dana Mosell ; Michele Biagioni ; Ed (at work) Sayles
Subject: Running the Orange County Marathon with the Garmin 205.

Julie

On Sunday I ran the Orange County Marathon and I used my new Garmin 205 for the first time in a marathon.

The biggest problem, and one that I have experienced on training runs, is that pushing the “lap” button on the face of the watch does not always end one lap and start the next. This is not good since I like to record the time it took to run each mile.

I don’t know if this is a problem with this particular watch, or the way and the mode that I am using it.  My work around for this problem is to hit the start/stop button. (This momentarily stops the watch).  Then I hit the lap button, now it indicates the time of that lap, then hit the start/stop again.  And of course try to get all of this done in a fraction of a second.  One mile 11 I forgot to hit the start/stop a second time.  When I realized what had happened nearly 5 minutes had gone by.   Going back over the data I could tell from the start time of the previous lap, the time of the previous lap, and the start time of the next lap, the total time of the lap in question.

My total distance for this marathon was 26.44 miles, and the various miles were measured to be between 0.99 miles and 1.02 miles.  (One case was off and the mile was1.09 miles, but the next was 0.93 miles for an average of 1.01).

To the extent the data can be believed it indicated a total ascent of 5302 feet and total decent of 5231 feet.  For me that is hard to believe on the relative flat Orange County course.   If I did 800 strides per mile or about 20,000 for the full marathon, and was swing my arm such that watch went up and down 3 inches, the total ascent of the watch would be about 5000 feet.

Another hard to believe statistic was that I burned 4028 calories.   I had always thought the rough rule of thumb was 100 calories per mile.

You were right about my hamstring bothering me.   I have the problem in the past, and on those occasions after running a quarter of mile or so, the pain goes away.   But not on Sunday.  At mile 2 I thought seriously of giving up. 

However, I knew my son and his family would be waiting for me at Mile 12, where the route goes by his office.  Of the 78 marathons I have done, this is only the second time that a family member has come out to see me run, and this time one of the members was my grandson.  So, I went on.  At mile 10 I gave my son a call to say that I was running behind schedule.   Eventually I made it to Mile 12 and we took pictures to record the event.  After that I thought ‘what is the hurry?’, and why hurt myself further, and changed from a running marathon (okay – run/walk marathon) to a walking marathon.  I figure that as the years go by and I get into my 70’s and 80’s I will be walking more, so I used this as practice on walking a marathon.   I once heard Steve Boone , one of the founders of the 50 States Marathon Club remark, ‘If you run a lot of marathons a year and you go out and have a bad day, you just consider it a training run.  But if you only run one marathon a year and have a bad day, then whole year is ruined’.   For me this was just a training run. 

Attached are two pictures.  One is of me, my son, and grandson.   The other taken at the Expo shows me and Dana Mosell standing next to Anita Swift, John Wayne’s granddaughter.

Charles