For my birthday last year (sounds such a long time ago - of course it's not) Ange bought me a gps enabled running watch - in essence a watch that records your gps co-ordinates, and therefore the distance you've run, your speed (and somehow altitude gain and loss) and then plots it all on what I suppose are Google Earth or GPS road maps (you can choose the view you want). Now before you snort into your hoodie (wait, of course, summer on that side of the world), let me say that this thing is pretty cool and indeed helpful. It protects you from "running tale" - which is the same as a "fishing tale" (whereby the size and weight of the unmeasured fish grows in the mind of the catcher, more especially when recounting the story to friends). None of this with the runner's watch - it tells you exactly how far you've run and in what time - and if you run trails as I mostly do - there is no way of knowing otherwise how far you've run (so runners tale risk looms large). You cant, for example, do a Grandpa George and measure your route by driving a car along it (come to think of it I'm going to run his old route when I'm back in SA so we can determine once and for all how far it is when you cut a little pavement corner here, and cross the road there). It also has a heart rate monitor which I've not yet put into use, need to get it out and revisit the instructions. For the time being, here's what it looks like, and at the very least it's a cool shot of Sheng Sze Wan smack in the middle, and the country park that I run through:
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