Two Things I Thought I'd Never Do

1.09.2011

Have you ever wanted to buy something that was expensive? Like, much too expensive for you to justify buying but something you secretly wanted and knew would make your life 1,000 times better?

For me, that thing was a watch. A Garmin 305 Forerunner GPS watch, to be exact. (No nerd jokes, please. Wait till you hear me out.) As if Jordan didn't get me enough for Christmas--like, oh I don't know, a diamond ring--he also bought me what I'd been talking about ever since I started training for my first half marathon.

If it looks big and cumbersome, I can promise you it isn't
I actually wasn't completely sure what the watch did, but I knew that it would be awesome and completely change my life forever. 

Well, I'm here to tell you that it has, because on January 1, 2011, I did two things I never thought I would do: 

1. Run outside in the cold while wearing gloves, leggings, and under armor. 
2. Run on grass, not pavement, without first mapping out the course.

While these might not sound like major, call-home-to-your-mother achievements, I was super excited. This watch is seriously worth every penny. I can't even tell you all the awesome things it does, because I don't know yet. The instruction booklet is the size of a short novel.

But what I have figured out about the watch is mind blowing. For starters, it tracks intervals, pace, calories, time, distance, heart rate, and it hooks up to your computer to show you the route you ran. It also shows your history of past runs and tells you how fast you ran each lap. You can include a warm-up and cooldown lap, and you can program the watch to pause when you aren't active, which is helpful if you're running a course that has a lot of stoplights and other annoying stuff like that.

Basically it is so awesome! I've braved the cold a few times since that initial run, and each time I get so excited to use my sweet new watch. 

Okay, I think I've babbled enough. All I can say is that it makes running fun...well, as much fun as it can be anyway. Now I just need a warmer pair of gloves. The rest of my body is fine, but my hands get cold after an hour in this crazy wind.

Ah, well, as they say, it's not worth it if you don't have to work for it.


Thus ends my fifth installment of "things that make me happy." For more, go here or here or here or here.
・ DESIGNED BY ECLAIR DESIGNS