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The sky was clear and the sun was beaming, so the coolness of the morning didn’t linger. By the end, it was boiling.
Sleeping satellites
I normally tell my Garmin watch to connect to the GPS satellites at the start of the briefing. This time, however, I was distracted by something in my shoe. That something turned out to be a ball of cat fur. By the time I’d fished it out and put my shoe back on, any thought of satellites was out of my head.
Out of my head, that is, until we were told to get ready for the start. I woke my watch up, but the satellite was asleep or busy, and didn’t connect in time. I pressed the button to start recording anyway as the ‘starting pistol’ went off. After a while, my watch buzzed at me – not to tell me the time of my first mile, but to tell me it was going back to sleep in a bit. It seems that it hadn’t connected and that telling it to record while unconnected doesn’t work.
After the first lap, I noticed that my watch had finally connected to the satellites. I wondered if it was worth recording only part of parkrun. I decided I might as well: some is better than none.
My official time was 37:12, which is faster than last time. I’m going in the right direction.
When I uploaded the data to my phone’s app for that, I noted that the Strava challenge I’d accepted wasn’t complete. I’d been banking on parkrun doing it for me. Pesky watch. Pesky satellites. I only have until Tuesday to run 80 per cent of 5 km.
