Today’s running lesson: you can run a pretty precise workout even if you don’t have your GPS running watch with you. But if you want a pure pleasure run, it might require running watchless in a completely new place.
I had driven most of the way to the Victory Avenue trailhead when I realized I didn’t have my trusty Forerunner 305 with me, or even my Droid phone with its running apps. How in the world could I run without knowing how far I’d gone, what my pace was, my heart rate, the elevation change. I was planning to do 8 miles and … maybe I better turn around and get it.
And then it hit me. I knew where the 8 mile turnaround on the Victory Avenue trail was. In fact, within a few hundred feet, I could picture:
- The 1.5 mile turnaround (mound on trail)
- The 2 mile turnaround (second dry stream bed)
- The 3 mile turnaround (rounding the corner after the killer uphill)
- The 6 mile turnaround (the steep downhill after the long gradual decline)
- The 8 mile turnaround (the second stream crossing where it’s really tough to get across dry)
I’d run that trail so many times with my watch and various distance goals, or had simply noted the distance where other runners turned around, that I knew the milestones.
And while I didn’t know how fast I was going on the way down, I knew on the way back that I was sticking close to the anaerobic threshold, the point where you go into oxygen debt and want to (eventually HAVE to) slow down. And whatever my watch would have told me my pace was, that was exactly the pace I wanted to run.
On some other run soon we’ll go over a corollary to this one: if you want to run just for the pleasure of it, don’t run a route that you often work out on with a GPS running watch. My true pleasure runs are watchless and run in a strange place.
