Bye-Bye Moto

Exercise: 4 mile run, negative splits

Today was my first day with my new Garmin 310xt. As far as I can tell it works perfectly and so much better than the Motoactv has in the last few months.

I received the Motoactv in May as a Mother's day gift and I was so excited about the music, map, and multi sport features. Cool features, too bad they never worked correctly. My main issue was that it lost signal ALL. THE. TIME. And often in places where I KNOW there is signal. Anytime I went under trees or in the shade of a building the gps would freak out. Then it started having trouble connecting to my heart rate monitor and then it would connect and jump around. The point of this device is to keep track of your athletic pursuits so the fact that it couldn't handle it's basic function was irritating.

There were numerous other little things that didn't work but I was willing to live with because I just wanted to be able to quickly see my pace and splits. The mileage was always a little off, like it would be 2.1 miles out and 2.2 on the way back, makes no sense but I imagine it was another gps thing. I also had a cadence sensor I used while cycling and it always took a few tries for it to just connect. Sometimes it would say it was connected and then not work. Not the end of the world but annoying for something that wasn't cheap.

Yesterday I spent 90 minutes on the phone with Motorola customer service trying to come up with some sort of solution or replacement after the device stopped connecting to anything at all. Argghh. They don't do replacements, they offered no solutions or help besides me shipping it to them and if I was lucky I would get it back in 12-14 business days, or 3 weeks. 3 WEEKS. I call BS. It's not that hard to do an advanced replacement. Especially because we paid $250 or so in May and you can now get one for $150.
Before I was even off the phone Music Man was ordering me a Garmin. I'm pretty sure I will never use a Motorola product again.

Not sure what I'll do with the Motoactv, maybe sell it on Ebay? Maybe it will work better after they fix it or send me a new one, but I doubt it. It seems like TONS of other people are having similar issues. And I probably would still try to use it if the customer service people were nicer, but man, they were awful. And I swear they just send you round and round so that you get annoyed and give up. Bad news, Motorola.

Please cross your fingers for me that the Garmin works!!

Have a great Wednesday!

Nerd Gadgets

Exercise: 10 miles biked, about 45 mins; 30 mins strength

Since receiving my new toy I've wanted to track every move I make. Even a leisurely Sunday bike ride has become competitive (competing only against myself) because I keep looking at my motoactv and thinking, "I can definitely go faster." This is great because now I'm getting way more out of my workouts. Yay for gadgets!

Speaking of gadgets, I kind of feel like a poser on my run with my motoactv on my wrist, my phone on my arm, my fancy headphones wrapped around my ears and my new trail running shoes.

They were black when I bought them (I'll review after I've had a chance to run in them a few times)

Especially while I'm killing myself to keep running a 14 mile pace (uphill, and fueled my a mother's day breakfast of bacon and biscuits and gravy!!!). All of my gadgets came in very handy since I was able to track on multiple devices and compare as well as upload to other sites to compare. I'm such a nerd but I love to keep track of my progress.

Sunday's was one of the hardest runs I've ever completed. About 10 minutes from my home there is a huge system of trails. I normally run on the fire roads and then break off to run on a smaller trail for a mile or 2 but the fire roads seem safest when running alone. Music Man suggested I try one of his favorite mountain biking trails; since I was able to run the eagle rock trail last week he felt confident I could make it up Caballero.

source

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Even though MapMyRun has the climbs categorized as moderately difficult the uneven ground and loose rock added an extra degree of difficulty. I looked like a dirty, sweaty, beast by the time I made it up the first climb.

I still had another few miles of climbing after crushing Caballero but knew that after I reached my destination I'd have a few miles downhill before my next climb. It's the little things that keep you going. And I'm happy I completed the whole loop (8 miles total) because it made me feel pretty accomplished.

I love looking at my laps so here they are for inquiring minds ;)

1. 11:59
2. 14:34
3. 12:17
4. 11:12
5.   9:29
6: 10:24
7. 10:30
8.   8:33

All over the place but you can clearly see where the ascents and descents are. Fun stuff.

Hope you had a great weekend and are having a fabulous week!

Croissants=Cwawesome

Exercise: 6.1 miles- 54:36, avg pace 8:56

My wonderful husband got me an early mother's day gift. The motoactv!!! I've had a Garmin 305, I've used plenty of apps (sportstracker[my fave], map my run, endomondo and strava) but this is my favorite so far. Its touch screen is super easy to use and navigate, the map function is awesome and it's super light weight. I loved the music option as well, although it did drain my battery quite a bit extra. I haven't run with music since 2008 and I can't tell you how much I missed it! (Even though it did play J Simpson and New kids on the block, unacceptable ;)

My favorite function is knowing my splits which some of the aps and the Garmin have access to. But then they didn't have other info I was interested in. Sportstracker didn't have split or lap time so anytime I wanted to know my splits I had to calculate in my head which is no fun while running. Sportstracker was great for calling out pace, distance, avg speed. Great function, user friendly and it never lost my data which some of the other aps did.

So here are my splits, just because:

1. 9:34
2. 8:52
3. 8:47
4: 8:53
5. 8:41
6. 8:55
6.1 :53

I had wanted to try for negative splits but I went out a bit fast. I'm super happy with my times though. It's amazing how a great run can really make your day.

After running I took little man on a bunch of errands. Our first stop was Costco and he freaked out when we got to the bread section. I just needed buns for a gathering we were having but he HAD to have the croissants. He kept shouting "bread, bread", and I told him that no, they were croissants, in my best heavy French accent. What he heard was "cwawsome." And proceeded to shout "cwaesome" through the store until we got to the car and I let him break into those puppies. I think he's right though, croissants are cwawesome.