Yesterday morning, I plotted out and ran 26.2 miles. It’ll be my longest run ’till the Trails4Tails Ultra Marathon, so I made it a good-luck-training-marathon.

The run itself was quite enjoyable, and it presents an opportunity to show off my newest toy: a Garmin Forerunner 410. My darling wife gave it to me as a wedding present, and it’s made my runs just a little happier ever since. The real fun part, though, is analyzing the data afterwards. Behold:

This is the most general breakdown of my run. Rest assured that I could offer you– mile per mile– my elevation gained or lost, calories burnt, best/worst/average pace, and tons of other stuff you don’t care about.

Or I could skip to the coolest part:

It compares the elevation of the terrain I cross (green) with my speed (blue). Pretty cool, eh?

A long time ago I wrote on my Garmin Forerunner. It was a great device, but it was big and clunky, and it suffered from a clumsy menu system. I likened it to a cyborg arm. Running watches have come a long way since then, but using them is still far from simple; in some ways the new features have actually made them harder to use. This difficulty seems to deter most customers; after all, running is about simplicity, right?

Enter the Nike SportWatch:

Nike’s recent collaboration with Apple seems to have rubbed off on it– In an Applish move, they intend to release a simplified version of the prevailing product. This watch will be limited, but through exclusion allow for more intuitive function. And it has a sexier, sleeker design than the competitors.

What can I say? Nike knows what sells.

Today is a dark day, readers. My little training helper has died.

After 3 years of dedicated service, my Forerunner has kicked the bucket. Though its batteries are charged, it manages no more than a few seconds of life each time I turn it on.

But I am not trying to criticize Garmin’s product, oh no. Instead, I would like to acknowledge its valuable service. It freed me up to run where I like without mapping routes out ahead of time. It gave me my location, speed, even the grade of the hill I was on.

And it did all of this in some pretty extreme circumstances; my pores release fluid so copiously that it resembles something less like sweat and more like lymph. To be coated in that stuff and still work is beyond most modern machines.

And that brings me to my next point, the most important lesson to take away from this experience. I plan on running for the rest of my life. Many, many miles to be crossed. And under the stress of my training, there is only one thing I can count on. No device, no matter how well designed, can match the dependability of my own body.

My Garmin Forerunner has come out of retirement this week. It’s old (201 model), without a heartrate monitor or a sleek new look. In fact, wearing it makes me look like I have a cyber arm. Look:

Not my arm, but you get an idea of how big this thing is.

But it more than gets the job done; it gives me access to all sorts of important information. For example, I had planned on running 7 miles Yesterday. I plotted it out on Mapmyrun.com and put it down on my Weekly Training page as “7 miles.” A Forerunner, however, could give you all of the following information:

Total Time: 48:23
Miles: 7.23
Average Pace: 6.42/mile
Calories Burnt: 788 cal

It can even tell you the grade of the hills you’re on. The coolest part of running with it, though, is the freedom that it allows. I’m not restricted to the routes I know from memory or the one that I planned out with MapMyRun. If I feel like taking a detour or a shortcut home, I’m free to do so. And I still know how it will affect my training.