Those little bedeviled details

Why is it the little things that drive us so crazy? My running is going fine; my training plan is working really well for me, and I feel pretty good. But now, of all things, my Garmin seems to be dying.

First it was the speaker, which gradually became taciturn. At first, I thought it was just me, that either I’d managed to lower the volume or that my ears were just playing tricks. No, it was the Garmin, losing its voice until it made no noise at all. Then there was a dead line across the screen. Some folks suggested resetting the device, which I’d had to do in the past when it temporarily locked up on me, but that made no difference this time. The final straw, now, is that it is refusing to cooperate with the charging/communication cradle. When docked, it now likes to power itself on, mysteriously and when I’m not looking, so that when I come to put it on, the battery charge is lowered significantly. Even when it’s not powering on, the connection between the device and the base seems spotty; the “Battery charging” message will flash on for a moment before disappearing and leaving a blank screen. As for getting it to “talk” to the training software…this morning, it took me twenty minutes of fiddling with it, turning it on and off and resettling it in the cradle, to get it to send the post-run data.

Enough.

But here’s the catch. The folks at Garmin are a lovely bunch and so very helpful; the guy to whom I spoke on the phone today was very sympathetic to my problem, and he even offered to take care of expedited shipping costs of a replacement unit for me, which I didn’t expect. But (and I realize how whiny this sounds) the switch-off between me sending mine in and the refurb getting here will be about a week to ten days. That’s a bunch of running that I’ll have to do without GPS, and…well, I’m a little bummed about that. I’d already have taken the Garmin to the post office this afternoon (I talked to the phone rep a few hours ago), but I have a fourteen-miler tomorrow morning, and I really don’t want to have to map out and remember fourteen miles worth of running. So tomorrow, maybe, and that will leave me with perhaps six or seven runs that will require some other method.

I’ll point out that while I do have particular areas that I frequently run and whose distance is familiar to me, we’ll be spending much of the next week on vacation. I really wanted to run in Green Bay, too. If push came to shove, I could just estimate the distance by time, since I know my “happy pace” is about an 8.5-minute mile right now. It’s a step-back week, so the “time logged in trainers” is probably more important than the miles covered, right?

I’m trying to talk myself into feeling better about it, I guess. It’s better than the other method of calling myself nasty names for being spoiled and pouting about something so stupid.

Unrelated, I got some Chocolate Cherry tomatoes at the farmers’ market this morning. I might go munch a couple now to console myself a little more.