Russell Turner | Happily Ever After

Happily Ever After

Life in The Rural Retreat with a beautiful wife, three cats, garden wildlife, a camera, a computer – and increasing amounts about running

Earlier posts can be found on Adventures of a Lone Bass Player, where this blog began life. Recent entries can be found here.

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Hello To The Sixties

by Russell Turner - 19:47 on 02 August 2018

A good birthday doesn’t have to involve parties and booze. Yesterday’s Big 60 got off to a surprising start when I walked downstairs to find balloons and bunting festooning the walls of The Rural Retreat, placed there a little earlier by Matchgirl despite the help of cats.

Several gifts were involved, all with a common theme: a Run4It gift card, a posh Ronhill running shirt, and a brand new Garmin 235 to replace the cast-off 210 I’ve used since my first steps last October. Matchgirl did me proud.

The evening found us at Vue in Inverness to see the new Mamma Mia film (my choice) followed by a tasty time at Thai Dining (also my choice). A birthday couldn’t have been better.

This morning, after getting to grips with its settings, I put the new Garmin to work on this week’s 40-minute easy run, which because of the heat (21ºC) and humidity was not as easy as it should have been. The resulting stats download revealed (unless Cathy the Duathonist or UltraPaul knows differently) that old and new activities can’t be mixed on the same page without a lot of faff, which is a nuisance.

More interestingly (to running nerds), I now know my VO2 Max (cardio fitness) is 41 – ‘excellent’ for my age, exceeded only by ‘superior’ – and that today’s running cadence was 143spm (steps per minute). Matchgirl was not impressed; a good cadence is 180, although my height brings the optimum figure down to 170, which still means there’s room for improvement. However, I think she was just jealous – my average stride length was exactly one metre, which is more than hers when running flat out.

Badger Update: Brock’s caught me out twice in the last couple of days by turning up early, leading to face-to-face meetings when I’ve stepped outside to scatter nuts and place the Bushnell. I can report that badgers move very fast when they need to.

Comment from Cathy at 06:46 on 03 August 2018.

Can't see why a new Garmin should cause any problems. I can see all your runs on GC, including this latest run with the 235.

Comment from Russell at 08:32 on 03 August 2018.

That's because I exported it from GC for the 235 and imported it into the GC for 210 page. There's nothing on the 235 page apart from the one run - it's like starting from scratch. I exported all the 210 activities as a CSV but the 235 page can't read them. Life's too short to export them individually as .fit files. Maybe I'm missing something obvious.

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