Running Electronics

In article said:

Don't know what the state of your killfile is, but I suspect he's talking
about either "CrabbyBeach", "bagpip", "TrueGrit" or "Lance Armstrong" (who,
despite the variety of names, are all the same guy)

Do they still post here?

Paul

That's them. Harsh tone doesn't bother me a bit. Unsupported opinion
does.

Cheers!

HRM's, peds, GPS units, and many other jogger related items can be found
at www.copingwithimpotency.com

Donovan Rebbechi said:

Don't know what the state of your killfile is

Sadly, no killfile, since I only post via google groups.

tkb

Quoted message said:

Minister Hugo said:

You suggest I would get nothing out of any of them - duly noted. Any
other opinions out there?

It depends on what you want.

I have a Nike triax cv10. It is not a GPS but it is another
little gadget...I liked tinkering with it for about a week.

I think it is "okay" but I
probably wouldn't buy it again. I originally wanted a GPS
because I run on various "routes" which aren't easy to measure
and I suspected that I was running slow as opposed to running
far. :-)

It is fairly accurate in gaging distance and I have checked it
several times. I haven't needed to recalibrate it.
It came with a HRM, but found that I don't really
use it. I used it a few times, found it interesting, but
the novelty wore off. It didnt irritate me to run with it
like I thought it would but I personally don't get a lot of use from
it.

One of the buttons fell off it after owning it a month and I also
got sand inside the buttons..which is slightly mysterious to me
as I was hardly building sandcastles. :-) For something that is
suppose to be waterproof... I would think that it could withstand
a little sand.

Overall, I wish I had just bought a Garmin (cheaper) to measure
distance of some of my running routes. For now, the Nike is mostly
an expensive timer.

Erika

Minister Hugo said:

BTW, the trolls seem hungry. Luddites.

If you can dismiss several of us as Luddite trolls, you'll have no
problem if we consider you a gadget nerd and not a serious runner,
right?

No serious offense (from me anyhow) intended toward you nor especially
toward ehargad - I have it on good authority Erika is a fine runner and
a bright, beautiful, and charming young lady - just feel like making a
case for Luddism. After all the Luddite side never gets equal (or any)
time, with both the advertisers and customer word of mouth (1)
representing the consumerist side.

I'm sure some runners do find these toys entertaining, motivating, and
maybe even useful month after month. I'm equally convinced they're
like January 2 health club memberships: for every one still in use by

April said:

I have a Nike triax cv10. It is [...] another little gadget...
I liked tinkering with it for about a week. I used it a few
times, found it interesting, but the novelty wore off.

Hey, it's your $300 not ours; but if the odds are good that those $300
will buy you a week learning a novel gadget plus a few years of a small
hunk of plastic taking up room in a drawer or a landfill - well, if you
ask us Luddites - and you did! - we can think of better bets for your
buck.

By your own description you've only been running a couple months. I'm
not denigrating that - hell, I'm envious: those first N months of
runnerdom are packed with discovery and excitement and joy - but it's
nowhere near assured that you'll even still be running in October. We
all hope you are, but refer to "health clubs" and "new years
resolutions".

Beyond that please meditate on what it is about running that engages
you. It's different strokes for different folks, and multiple things
for most of us. One theme shared by many is that it's a blessed,
needed, re-humanizing escape from technology, from our rigid
left-brained modern Western automated computerized
efficiency-economy-numbers-results first, humans second world... an
escape from the goddamned Matrix, my man!

(Or maybe you live "off the grid (Matrix)" in the most remote rural
Appalachia/Siberia/Antarctica and this concern is foreign to you...)

And not only do we question why you'd want to drag the Matrix with you
into the running world on the grounds that it undermines a big part of
what's most enjoyable and most necessary about running; but more
mundanely, reliance on a machine to tell you how hard you're working
and how fast you're going must surely stifle the development of your
own facilities for monitoring this stuff. At least if the machine is
always there and always used, like the calculator has taken basic
arithmetic from the last few generations. (2)

OTOH I'll concede it may be useful to employ a gadget periodically in
the development and fine-tuning of one's own senses, e.g. learning how
a spectrum of paces feels and how those feelings measure on a HRM, so
you develop skill estimating both. But a couple months into your
running, you're still learning about running and your body and mind
just about every day without making any special effort to. And a few
sessions at a track or other measured course with a stopwatch (or any
watch with a seconds hand) will teach you plenty about pace and effort.

So do what you want, but don't buy an expensive gadget because it is
required for running, or for running well - it isn't - or because your
couple hundred bucks is needed more urgently by some consumer
electronics company than a poor farming village in Laos (or for your
childrens' college fund, or for a better haircut for crying out loud) -
it isn't. It won't do the running for you or make you run better. In
some ways it may even insulate you from the running.

(1) And that customer word of mouth is driven by various motivations:
altuistic desire to help one's fellow man make the right choice;
attempting to help what seems like a good company, or hurt a bad one,
by praising or damning its product; dressing up as a reviewer to
impress with one's mastery of the domain, er, product, and one's
writing skills; quite often buyers attempting to convince themselves
they've made a good decision; et cetera.

(2) Yeah, if the calculator is always available, in one sense we no
longer need the skill and can move on; but the resultant innumeracy
also works against many of us, e.g. when we don't automatically know
about how much change to expect when paying with a fifty, or maybe when
we don't understand why we'd want a 15 or 30 year fixed mortgage when
those adjustable rates are so much less. Seems to me this was
discussed to death 20 years ago by much better writers than me so feel
free to google for something more articulate.

Charlie Pendejo said:

Minister Hugo said:

BTW, the trolls seem hungry. Luddites.

If you can dismiss several of us as Luddite trolls,

Well in all fairness, he was only dismissing several instances of one of us
(Lance Armstrong, bagpip, etc).

Quoted message said:

you'll have no problem if we consider you a gadget nerd and not a serious
runner, right?

In fact as an owner of a GPS unit, a fitsense, an MP3 player, a cheap bike
computer with extra magnets to facilitate this technique:

http://home.earthlink.net/~caverhall/newrevcounter/abstractcontents.htm

I'd have no problem with being called a gadget freak, even as I play devils
advocate and make the case for the Luddite.

By the way, allow me to reiterate that out of the three gadgets -- the bike
computer, the fitsense, and the GPS -- the bike computer is by far the one
that I have the most confidence in as a measuring device. An even more
low-tech Jones counter (this is a mechanical ergometer, not a computer) would
be even better but more expensive at ~$80. Sure it's a pain to get out there
and measure a 10 mile route, but you do it only once and you've got a
measurement that you can trust. You don't have to measure it half a dozen
times because you don't trust reproducibility of the unit, and then still not
quite trust the measurement, because you wonder if there are any differences
that matter between your calibration course and your measured course (e.g.
maybe the calibration parameter drifts when pace is different, maybe it drifts
over time, etc).

[snip]

Quoted message said:

(1) And that customer word of mouth is driven by various motivations:
altuistic desire to help one's fellow man make the right choice;
attempting to help what seems like a good company, or hurt a bad one,
by praising or damning its product; dressing up as a reviewer to
impress with one's mastery of the domain, er, product, and one's
writing skills; quite often buyers attempting to convince themselves
they've made a good decision; et cetera.

And this is the main reason I'm following up. Like you, I find customer
reviews to be highly problematic for this reason. A positive review that
is written shortly after product purchase could actually be motivated by
buyers guilt. For this reason, I'd tend to distrust any review by a buyer
who's owned the product for less than a few months. They're less likely
to have run into possible problems with the product and more likely to be
motivated to ignore any that they may have encountered (again, a sort of
buyers guilt suppression)

Cheers,
--
Donovan Rebbechi
http://pegasus.rutgers.edu/~elflord/

Quoted message said:

For this reason, I'd tend to distrust any review by a buyer who's
owned the product for less than a few months. They're less likely
to have run into possible problems with the product and more likely
to be motivated to ignore any that they may have encountered

Absolutely true: I've done it myself. Rave review, failing to mention
(or emphasize) a niggling little bit of trivia which months later had
grown into the most important thing about this crappy product I'd never
buy again.

I said:

bucks ... needed more urgently ... for a better haircut for crying
out loud

OK, you caught my red-handed, it's twue it's twue. I just threw in the
haircut bit for humorous effect ala Miss Anne Thrope.

If you thought I was serious and had accused me of hypocrisy, you'd
have had a point: as you may have been aware, I got my customary cheap
haircut at my local Moroccan barber today, and it's not very good.
Feel terrific though.

Lots of great advice in Donavan's message.

I don't really disagree with anything that was posted, but in the
defence of gadget geeks everywhere, I'd just make a couple of
additional points.

First, I've owned a couple of these devices as well, particular the
Fitsense and Garmin. I bought the Garmin (within the last 3 months, so
let it be duly noted that my advice is suspect!) because I really
enjoyed the basic functionality of the Fitsense but was frustrated with
its limitations. I'd used the Fitsense for the previous two years.

The Fitsense gave me much of the information I was looking for, but had
a number of technical limitations. Having to recalibrate every time I
wore a different pair of shoes (for example) became a major irritant,
as did the constant replacement of batteries (which, especially in the
foot pod) was a serious pain in the a**e. My unit also never really
worked properly if I was walking (no matter how much effort I went to
during the calibration phase), so any walking distance was usually lost
in the log. Less importantly, it couldn't display metric units and
wasn't useful for anything other running (I would have loved to have
had it for cross-country skiing, for example).

The Garmin, so far, has addressed all of those issues. It also
introduces its own quirks (occasionally flakey HRM, for one), so it's
not perfect either. I'm also lucky in that my running patterns tend to
be favourable for GPS reception (don't run in heavily built-up areas,
don't run in trails with heavy tree cover). YMMV.

As far as the need for the device, it's clearly just a toy. That said,
as a gadget freak, it's a toy that truly does motivate me (prior to and
after runs...during the run it usually sits unloved and unregarded on
my wrist). For me, it's an auto-logger, not a training consultant. I
also find it liberating. Instead of confining myself to certain
pre-measured routes, I can run anywhere I want every time I head out,
and still have a mostly accurate record of distance, pace and heart
rate (and, less accurately, elevation).

You obviously don't need a GPS to run, anymore than you need an MP3
player or anything else really except a good pair of shoes. However,
for some of us, at least, it can add to the experience and give you
some valuable insight and feedback into your running performance.

The luddites I was referring to are the ones who talk along the lines
of "It's a gadget, therefore you don't need it" and stop there. I
wonder if these trolls consider digital watches to be gadgets, and
avoid them as well? On the other hand, saying that this gadget or that
one is not all it's cracked up to be because (fill in experience
yourself) is tremendously useful, and was what I was hoping for. So
thanks to all that passed along their experiences.

I was particularly interested in two aspects of these gadgets -
measuring pace and heart rate. As it happens, I'll probably not buy
one of these gadgets right now. They don't seem to be a particularly
great advance over my cycle computer which I can use to measure routes,
and my wrist-watch. It means I have to follow my routes on bike (not
such a big deal) and do some calculations in my head to get pace, heart
rate.

I will, however, have another look at them when I see another
generation come out or the prices come down (yeah, it might happen.
quit snickering). Right now, they don't seem to be mind-blowing for a
runner at my level. Besides, some of the guys I run with have them
(the Garmins in particular), and they love to give frequent updates of
pace and distance. I'd probably do it too if I had one.

Finally, thank goodness for the people that buy these things and don't
use them - the gadget freaks, and Jan 2-ers. Don't knock 'em. They
put them on eBay for a fraction of the price you'd pay new.

Cheers!

Minister, you're a gadget, and therefore I don't need you.

Hey! That's Minister Gadget to you, miss!