purplekicks
Mouseketeer
- Joined
- Jul 19, 2013
Sorry to hear about your back. Sending plenty of happy healing vibes!
Have a great Christmas in Disneyland!
Have a great Christmas in Disneyland!
Thank you! It's definitely feeling better by not good enough to attempt a run yet. Soon, I hope!Sorry to hear about your back. Sending plenty of happy healing vibes!
Have a great Christmas in Disneyland!
Definitely get there...just don't go over Christmas!Oh you're making me miss Cali! I'm from just north of San Francisco. Glad your back is feeling better and that you're having fun! I'm definitely going back to Disneyland this year!
Knowing what I know about you (I see your posts on the News/Rumors forum and on WDWMagic), you would love the museum. It was so cool! And hey, good luck this weekend!Well at least you're having a good time despite the weather and your back. The Walt Disney Family museum is on my list of things to do.
It was definitely a highlight of the trip! I highly recommend it.Yay Walt Disney Family Museum! I've heard it's really great. We missed it on our SF trip, but my parents went and I've seen all of their pictures.
Thanks. Still not quite 100% yet, but it's getting there.I'm glad your back is getting better - hopefully it'll be back to 100% soon!
Thanks! My dad said it looks like it's photoshopped...I guess I'd have to agree, but I still like it!LOVE that shot of you two in front of the Golden Gate. Just fantastic. Hope you are having a wonderful trip!!
Thanks Karen.Hey!! I'm really sorry to hear about your back issues
Looks like that is falling through, sadly. I'll have to settle for Princess Weekend, I guess.EXCITING that you might be at WDW in January though!
Thank you! I hope you had a good Christmas too. Good luck this weekend!!I hope you had a lovely Christmas and a fantastic time in Disneyland
Welcome, and thanks! Back isn't 10% yet, but almost there! I'm hoping we see some pics of the medals tomorrow, assuming they are out at the WDW Marathon Weekend expo!Just found your training plan. I loved reading your trip reports. I have always been a "lurker" on the dis boards and am new to posting. I am doing the GSC this Feburary and starting to get excited but nervous. Hope your back is feeling better!
Yay! Welcome! Definitely go Coast-to-Coast, the medal is amazing!Joining in to follow along. I'm planning on doing coast to coast in 2017 as a pre-turning 30 bucket list thing.
Happy New Year, Emily!Happy New Year, Shannon (and everyone else reading along!)
Yeah, this trip didn't turn out exactly the way we'd hoped but we made the best of it. We're still recovering from it!The holidays and my work schedule totally derailed me these last two weeks but I'm taking the new year/new month as a good opportunity to get back on track. I'm glad to hear that you've stuck with it and are taking good care of your back! It's unfortunate that the weather in SF wasn't great but I'm glad you got in some good sites and made in to DL. Hope you have a good rest of your trip!
Ooooh the new watch looks like a lot of fun! I'm going to pretend it doesn't have all those bells & whistles that I've been looking for (I have the FR220 as well). So pretty!!Goodbye Money! Garmin Forerunner 230 and Brooks Adrenalines GTS 16
Last week I mentioned scoring a deal on the Garmin vivoactive, and then promptly returning it. Despite the fact that the vivoactive didn't work out for me, the seed had been planted for me to look into upgrading my trusty Forerunner 220.
Here's what I was looking for in a new watch...
These were the two must-haves. The vivoactive checked those boxes, so I bought it. It also had smartwatch features (notifications pushed from my phone), which wasn't something I had really been looking for in a watch - just a bonus, I guess. I unexpectedly ended up really liking the notifications, though - at work we sit in cubes, so I keep my ringer off all day. This way I still don't miss calls or messages while still being able to keep the ringer off.
- Had to be a stand-alone GPS watch (not like the Apple Watch, where you need to take your phone with you on a run)
- Had to have step tracking that was compatible with my employer's Employee Wellness program (if I track 100,000 steps per month - stupidly easy for a runner to do - I save a good chunk of change on my health insurance premium)
I had the vivoactive for a little less than a week before returning it. There were some small issues that I could look past (dim screen - which I knew about from reading reviews, not easy to see time of day while running, plus some other things I'm forgetting), but the biggest deal breaker (and really the only thing that annoys me about my Forerunner 220, besides it lacking step tracking capabilities) was how long it took to find GPS satellites - it was no better than my FR220. And beyond that, I couldn't easily tell when satellites were found (something the 220 is really good at).
I thought about it and realized that I'm pretty happy with my 220 - if it could find GPS quicker and track steps that could sync at work, it would be perfect (I was using a FitBit Charge to track steps, which I liked - but didn't like wearing both it AND my FR220 on runs). Smart notifications would be a bonus. And then I figured out that this watch (220 + activity tracking + smart watch features) actually DOES exist in the form of the Garmin Forerunner 230, the upgrade to the 220.
It looks almost exactly like my 220.
I did some research (there are limited reviews out since it's new) and realized that if I wanted this watch, I'd need to pay full price for it since it had just been released. But then I remembered getting an email from a local running store with their Black Friday deals - one of them was receiving a bonus $20 gift card for each $100 gift card purchased, and the deal was good through the end of December.
I headed to the running store and bought a few gift cards...then turned around and used them for my purchase right there on the spot. I had to pay tax, obviously (which I wouldn't have if I'd bought the watch online) but I still saved overall, since this watch isn't really on sale for a discount anywhere - I think I could have maybe gotten it for 10% off? So still a little more than what I ended up paying.
I'm really liking it so far. I downloaded the above watch face (for free) which changes with the time of day (sun and clouds during the day, stars at night), so that's kind of fun. No Mickey watch faces available, unfortunately, but there are a decent number of Star Wars offerings.
The smart notifications have been working well and are easy to read (and are making me realize that I need to get off of some email lists - I get so much junk mail!)...I actually think they show up a little better on the 230 than they did on the vivoactive.
LivingSocial is one of the worst junk mail offenders for me...I get 3 emails from them per day. Unnecessary.
And I found that I didn't really like the touchscreen function on the vivoactive, so I'm glad to have the buttons and NO touchscreen on the 230. I think I'll especially appreciate that when it starts getting REALLY cold out and I don't have to remove gloves to use the touchscreen (which I also found didn't work super well when I was sweaty).
I was fooling around customizing the running portion of the watch (there are screens where you can pick what data fields to display) the day I got it - the GPS beeped to let me know it found satellites within 30 seconds, and there was an indicator saying as much on the main screen, so obviously that's a big bonus for me.
See those little bars in the top left of the screen?! You couldn’t have given me those, vivoactive?!
Another big bonus of this watch that I found in my research (and by "research" I mean "reading DCRainmaker's website") is that you can customize the data screens while running with 4 fields! This must be proof of my gigantic running nerd-ness because I was pretty excited to have this feature back - this is something I haven't had on a watch since my Garmin 305 (my first-ever GPS running watch - that thing was a tank. It's what I’m wearing in my 2011 Princess Half Marathon trip report). I customized my first screen with Overall Distance, Overall Time, Overall Average Pace and Time of Day (!!):
And my second screen has Lap Distance, Lap Time, Lap Pace and Overall Average Cadence (which I am supposed to be working on, so this is super helpful - assuming it's accurate):
Mr. A is impressed and basically was just like, "I guess you get what you pay for." Don't get me wrong, I still think the vivoactive is a great watch, but the FR230 is better FOR ME in almost every way - the only thing I'm missing on the vivoactive is how thin it was. That's literally it - everything else is better, in my opinion, on the FR230. I've found 2 quirks so far...
1. How it shows how full the battery is - I had to download a widget (free, like the watch face) to show me what percentage of the battery is left (I don't like just relying on the picture). Now that I have that, I have it set up so that I just scroll up once from my home watch screen to see the battery percentage. Sort of weird that I had to download that (maybe it's an included feature that I just haven't found yet?), but whatever. I'll be curious to see how the battery performs with regular use
2. I haven't figured out how to tell the watch when I want it to find GPS. Whenever I use it just as a regular watch/step tracker, it doesn't search for GPS...which is good because the battery doesn't drain as quickly that way. Then I'm supposed to press the top right button to tell it I want to run, and for the two runs I have done with this watch, pressing that button doesn't seem to make it understand that it's time to find GPS. I've gotten around that by turning the watch off and back on, but I feel like there's something I'm missing. Seems like it shouldn't need to be powered on/off?
The activity tracker screen (big reason why I wanted to upgrade my watch)...if I don't move for an hour it'll yell at me (in the form of a vibration). I thought this would annoy me, but since I sit at a desk all day for my job I guess being reminded to get up and walk around once in awhile isn't the worst thing in the world. The vivoactive did buzz at me once in a meeting (which actually WAS annoying), but I recently figured out that Garmin has some sort of "do not disturb" feature one can use to turn the vibrations off (which explains a lot since this thing also tracks sleep - something I’m not sure I'll ever use it for - but I have wondered what people do when they sleep - sleep through the watch buzzing at them?!). I assume the vivoactive has this feature as well, but I hadn't found it in the few days that I owned mine.
Right now the FR230 is calculating daily goals for me, but there is an option to just set 1 constant daily goal (i.e. 10,000 steps per day) so I need to decide if I want to change that.
And like I mentioned above, I've run with the watch twice. The accuracy seems similar to my FR220, and the first time I used the watch (after turning it off and back on), it found GPS satellites in just over a minute. Today it was more like 15 seconds - crazy fast.
The battery has been good so far. It was at 100% the day I bought it (Sunday) and after wearing it as a normal watch all week and doing 2 runs with it (90ish minutes of running) my widget is telling me the battery still has 54% left yet. Not bad.
Overall, very pleased with the switch...and I plan on listing my FR220 (goodbye, old friend) and my FitBit Charge on eBay after we get back from vacation. Hopefully I can put a dent in the FR230 cost by selling those things.
My other running gear purchase was a new pair of shoes - the Brooks Adrenalines GTS16. I'd wanted to grab a pair of the 15s on sale, but they get awful reviews - across the board people have said they run a half size too small (seriously, Brooks? Whyyyyy). I didn't have a store locally that had the 15s for me to try on a half size up, and I was too nervous to risk buying them online, so I just bit the bullet and bought a new pair (using the aforementioned giftcard deal, so at least I saved some money):
Hey, they match my watch!
I talked to the employee about my concerns with the 15s and she said that they 16s run more true-to-size. They did feel better when I tried them on. I was starting to feel some aches that made me think it was time to retire the neon pink 14s I've been wearing since January, so it was crunch time. I did my first run in the 16s today and they felt soooo much better. I'm considering heading back to the running store to get another giftcard deal and grab another pair...we'll see if I remember to do it before the deal runs out.
Happy Saturday!
Continued in Next Post
Haha, I know what you mean! I put my FR220 up on eBay and it has 1 bid so far (a whopping $49.99). But I really like the FR230 a lot!Ooooh the new watch looks like a lot of fun! I'm going to pretend it doesn't have all those bells & whistles that I've been looking for (I have the FR220 as well). So pretty!!
Thanks! I have had a couple of setbacks and am hoping to start up again on Monday...so that'll be 3 weeks of no running. But they just released the medals so that's some motivation for me!I hope you had a magical trip to DL & I hope your back is starting to feel better!