Garmin Uploading Troubles Update

A couple posts ago I wrote about "Technology, Love it and Hate it".  To summarize, I had done a couple workouts using my Garmin Forerunner 310xt, and was unable to upload the files to my account on Garmin Connect.  After filtering through the message forums on the Garmin website, I found my solution.

There were a lot of suggestions about "corrupt files" (I'm not computer-literate enough to know much about fixing this problem).  There were also the obvious suggestions about reading the user manual.  Pretty dumb suggestion, thanks.  My solution just happened to be a lone-post.  And it wasn't even the poster's main point!  At the end of his post, he mentioned that one time his Garmin time stamped his workout with the wrong date.  So when he uploaded his workout, it was actually uploaded in the wrong year.  This got me thinking.  I decided to look at the master list of my uploaded workouts, and found 3 workouts on September 21, 2010 that were "untitled" (I always label my workouts, so I knew these were new).  I looked at each workout, and sure enough, these were my missing files!  Crazy!

As annoying as this whole deal was, I'm definitely glad to have found the files.  And, now that I know that this has happened once, if something fishy happens again, it will be the first thing I look for.

IMAZ Training - Week 3

Another easy week down the tubes.  This week was pretty much as successful as last week.  I ended up with 2 runs, 4 bikes, and 1 swim.  I definitely could use more swim time, but my main focus is going to be on the bike, since I'm still quite slow.  More bike time now equals less bike time in the race, right?  We'll see!  I'm not going to include a daily recap of last week, since it's just a TRANSITION week, and really isn't required to have much structure.  I will, however, be doing the exact same workouts next week!  Woo hoo!  Here's that schedule again:

Sunday - Run - 400m, 600m, 800m, 1200m, 800m, 600m, 400m.  All done basically all-out and with a 400m RI between each.

Monday - Swim - 30 minutes in Zone 2 with drills.  Bike - 45 minutes in Zone 2 with variable gearing.

Tuesday - Run - 5 miles @ 6:26/mile

Wednesday - Swim - 30 minutes in Zone 2 with drills.  Bike - 1:00 in Zone 2 with variable gearing.

Thursday - Run - 9 miles @ 6:49/mile

Friday - Swim - 45 minutes in Zone 2.

Saturday - Bike - 1:30 in Zone 2 with 5 sets of spin-ups, followed immediately by a 30 minute tempo run.

So go ahead and train with me.  It's gonna be fun!

Technology. Love it, and hate it.

I've said in previous posts that I own a Garmin 310xt.  It's a personal GPS watch that is made for endurance sports, and more specifically, triathlons.  Here's a look at it:

You can adjust the screen to display about 20 different things, in an almost unlimited combination.

This thing of beauty has really altered how I train, for the better.  The way I like to explain it, is that it's like having a coach follow you around during your workouts and yell at you when you're not doing it right.  It can tell me to slow down, speed up, slow down or speed up my heart rate, pedal faster, etc.  It really is awesome.  And don't let what I'm about to say lead you to believe that I would ever consider getting rid of it.  Because I won't.

Though I do love my watch, from time to time I seem to have some issues.  Not so much with the watch itself, but with the uploading of my workouts.  Right now, in fact, I'm trying to upload my three latest workouts, a bike and two runs.  I am having no luck whatsoever.  And, it seems that other people are having issues too.  The forum is pretty full of people having my same problem.  The whole process usually only takes about 3-5 minutes.  This time, I'm going on two hours.  Crazy!  And all I really want is to get my workouts recorded into cyberspace so I can have them recorded with the rest of my workouts.

I know that "speed bumps" are part of technology, but they suck.  Especially when there's not really anything you can do about it, other than keep trying.  And so I shall.  Most likely all day.  At least there will be some good commercials on today that I can watch while I curse this uploading process.