Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

Geek toys for runners

I've alluded before to the useful way in which way running allows a gadget geek such as myself to access a whole new area of nifty technical toys. Heart rate monitors, clothing made of nifty wicking microfibres, a zillion types of shoe including ones with big scary spikes on the bottom and equipment to analyse your gait and work out why you get cramp in your right calf after ten minutes, hi-tech water bottles, energy gels, heart rate monitors which log distance and speed and interface to your mobile phone to provide nifty graphs of your performance, you name it.

Whether all this stuff actually performs the fundamental functions of making you run faster or increasing endurance is open to debate, but I have a theory that gadgets are good for distance running as they give you something to play with en route and stop you getting bored. Because it's obviously critical to make sure that you're training at exactly, say, 160 beats per minute on the HRM - not 162 or 159, 160 - you spend plenty of time trying to hit that target and before you know it - hey presto - you've finished your run. Of course, that assumes that you don't run into a lamp post or a pillar-box on the way due to being preoccupied with whatever's strapped to your wrist. Don't laugh - only a few days ago I ran, gently, into a pillar box and almost ended up finding myself unintentionally cuddling the thing after a woman I was about to overtake on the pavement suddenly stopped to post a letter. We both apologised profusely at each other repeatedly in one of those fantastic British apology competitions before going on our respective ways.

This is, I guess, a convoluted way of getting round to what I originally wanted to say, which is that I've found what is possibly the geekiest piece of running kit available - the Garmin Forerunner 201. Geeks will immediately spy that this is a GPS doodad from the Garmin label attached to it. It's a GPS receiver which straps to your wrist and performs various useful functions for the runner - just dial in the pace you want to run and it'll nag you when appropriate, log your run and lap speeds, manage your interval sessions with the precision and forceful authority of a 1970s East German coach, and generally act as an extremely geeky accessory for the geeky runner.

The first time I saw that such a thing was available I had that "it MUST BE MINE!" feeling that's familiar from the first times I saw things like MacOS X, Baldur's Gate, the DVD release of The Day Today and the iPod. I'm currently holding back my gadget-geek instincts in a vain attempt not to order one, but I'm not sure how long I can hold on.

Just as well I've got a bunch of stuff lined up for selling on eBay and Amazon, really.

Posted by mpk at October 18, 2004 12:12 AM | TrackBack