How’s your relationship with your GPS watch? Maybe it’s time for a breakup or at least a short separation.
Transcript
Good afternoon runners hope all’s well I just want to come and talk today.
First of all, if you notice I have the the wired headphones, I read an article this week that that’s where all the cool kids are doing the wire headphones coming back because the earbuds get get too, too ubiquitous and so they weren’t cool anymore. Well, I’m happy to say that you stick around for long enough, it finally comes full circle because I never left. The Wire headphones always have the wire headphones, experimented with the wireless ones always lose them. And so it’s good to know that I’m finally back to being cool again.
But what I wanted to talk about was, was GPS watches, and how sometimes they can cause you a lot of anxiety, and how it could be good to turn them off. So to give you a little bit of perspective, I’ve been running long enough that I feel like I ran well, before GPS watches existed. I had the old Timex chronograph. And now I have a Garmin GPS watch. And I love it, that’s great. But one of the bad things about a GPO, there’s a lot, there’s a ton of good things, right, we could have a whole talk on that. But one of the bad things about a GPS watch is that you can kind of get a slave to the laps. And you judge your performance based upon whatever time it says in a lab split. And if you’re tired, if you’re in the midst of a tough week, you know, if you’re not feeling a little bit good, if you’re running a lot of miles, whatever it is, right? You can sometimes look at that lap pace and it can, it can almost it can almost set your mood right, it can almost put you in a good mood, bad mood and can cause you a lot more anxiety than it does good.
And so one of the tips that I do when I’m in situations like that is let’s say I’m doing an easy run. And it’s good to bring the GPS watch so you know how far you have to run for sure. But one of the things you can do is turn off the auto lap feature, turn it off. And if you do that, your watch won’t be giving you lap paces every every minute, it won’t give you lipases at all, unless you look at it. And what I have found is just turn it on, let it record. Because you want to have your watch, maybe it’s a safety mechanism, bring your watch, turn off the auto lap feature. And just have your main watch face be the time of the day. Don’t even look at your patient just run. Right get back to what it was like to run before the technology before all the data.
And you know, just just try to enjoy the experience and an easy run, it’s a great time to do that. You can listen to your breath. You can pay attention to your running form, you can take in the nature, the surroundings, whatever it is, right. But you can get away from just the anxiety that happens every eight to 10 minutes. When you’re running when you’re running the lab, you can get away from all that. So give that a try. I think you’ll find it is a great mental break, to not have to have that constant stimulus. It allows you just to get out there to run to relax, to just to enjoy things sometimes and not having to be not having to be work and to be difficult, like so many other things that we have in your life. So hopefully that helps Best Wishes chasing your running goals.
George Parker 