System failure!

After my bodily failings of the last few days, I suffered a breakdown of a different sort today.

The plan was to do 15 or 16 miles, with the middle 5 miles at marathon pace. I locked the front door behind me and instinctively switched on my Garmin Forerunner as the next thing after turning the key in the lock - I'm a creature of habit, and I hate having to wait for it to tune-in to the satellites! I glanced down at the display to see (with abject terror!) that the battery indicator showed empty - zero hours of battery life left!

I confess I actually considered delaying my run by an hour, to let the battery charge. Thoughts of whether to eat some more breakfast, and how late in the day I'd finish the run, went through my mind. A quick sanity check though, and thoughts along the lines of "don't be stupid, you are so pathetic if you think you can't go running without a gadget" were buzzing around my head.

A deep breath, a few nervous steps, and I was off on my run. As expected, the GPS gave out within the first mile, and I was on my own!

People assume I'd be lost without my GPS and HR monitor, but I reckon the opposite is actually true. As I run with them all the time, I have a pretty good idea of what pace I should be running at. My run went well, but I have no idea what pace I ran the middle 5 miles at. I ran at a pace which felt right. I still had my HRM with me, and it read exactly what I'd expect without me having to vary my pace too much to keep in line with it. I tried to run to feel rather than be dictated by HR. I did a comfortable 40+ minutes at what felt like marathon pace - I just have no exact measure of the distance.

My run was 2 hours 30 minutes. I think it was about 16 miles. Training objective achieved!

Could I have run without both GPS and HRM? Probably, but I might have run a little too quickly over the duration of the run. The big advantage of the HRM is making sure I keep my slow runs slow.

I've had my HRM 2 years now and the battery is due to run out. I'll have to send it back to Polar to get it changed. I'm not sure how long that will take. It's occurred to me that it might fail just before the marathon and I might not have it on race day. Could I cope without it? I'd rather not put that to the test thanks!