Gotta Start Somewhere

These are my new running/walking shoes, known in the trade as Asics GT-2120. When I went to JackRabbit on Wednesday, they had other shoes with cool names like Cumulus and Nimbus (which tickles the 4th-grade wannabe meteorologist in me), but these were the most comfortable. I also picked up some pants, a wintry weather ear cozy, a promise that the sports bra I was looking for would probably be in on Friday, and this cool new gadget made by Nike and Apple for the iPod nano. Don't be fooled; it works just fine with shoes that aren't Nikes. In fact, the gem of a salesguy at JackRabbit offered to sell me a pouch to clip onto my shoelaces to hold the little sensor in place, but then confided that he stuffs his under his shoelaces and it works just fine. Bless him. So part of the gizmo goes on your shoe and the other part plugs into your nano. It can do all sorts of tricks, but the first time I tried it, I just set the length of my workout and it told me as I went how much time had elapsed and how much I had still to go. At the end, my nano screen displayed my distance, average speed, and would probably have told me more if I had asked.

A couple hours after we got home...I went on my 30-minute first training walk! Five or ten minutes in, I started to have pain along my left backside, and so I stopped to stretch for a moment, and eventually, it went away. I did my best to move at a fairly brisk clip, but didn't push super-hard. I liked the soothing female voice cutting into the episode of This American Life I was listening to, telling me how long I had been walking, and after the halfway point, how long I had left. It also happened to be Halloween, and I was out around 6pm, prime trick-or-treating time in Park Slope. 7th Avenue resembled some of the more congested sections of the London Marathon, I'd imagine, except that no one was trying for a personal best, and so I quickly escaped to the calm of 8th Avenue. About 20 minutes into my walk, I passed some adults out in front of a brownstone, and they cheered as I walked by, exclaiming: "A speedwalker! Hooray! What a great costume!" I think they were joking, but either way, it means I was convincing, right? More than that, it made me feel great, and gave me a miniature sense of what it might be like to have supporters along the route of a marathon. So I need to make sure to participate in one with big crowds on the sidelines. London remains appealing.

I'm even more in love with this Nike doohickey now. It connects you to a whole online world that will plot your workouts, allows you to challenge other people, and a host of other things I haven't checked out yet. Okay, I'm a sucker for marketing and pretty pictures, but it only cost me $29 and I already had the nano, so I'm pleased. I'm going to post the stats for my various training walks, starting with this one.

Time: 30:08 - Distance: 2.21 miles - Avg Pace: 13:36/mi.
Soundtrack: This American Life--Special Ed

I'll put this up at the top from now on, but I didn't think it belonged there this time, since at the beginning of the post, I hadn't yet decided I was doing this thing. And it looks as though now, I have.