My Garmin 205 is not dead yet but it's close enough to throw on the cart. Starting in February, the watch would Spontaneously Turn Off Power (STOP). This seemed to happen near the beginning of a ski for whatever reason but once I made it past 5 or 10 minutes, it seemed to stay on for however long I skied. This occurred maybe once per week, or even every other week. On Friday, the watched STOPed about 1 mile into James and my run to mark Blackstrap Heaven and on Saturday, it STOPed about 5 s into the race but then it worked fine during my Saturday afternoon run to pick up the course. Sunday, I had 4 STOPs during our 12+ mile run at Pineland and then this morning on my commute into school, I had probably 20 STOPs! Yes, I kept turning the watch on and it would just pick up where it left (or turned in this case) off. So while I seem to have extended the useful life out of my watch, with little frustration, for about 2 months, I think it's time to retire it.
The good news is that I purchased a 305 through Amazon and paid the $3.99 for 1 day shipping so I should have it for Twin Brook tomorrow night. Curiously, my watch worked almost perfectly on the commute home from school but did STOP with about 1/4 mile to go.
Interestingly, my run at Pineland yesterday and my commute home today were safely recorded in the watch's history and so I was able to load them into MotionBased. But my morning commute, the one with the 20+ STOPs, didn't get recorded into the history. Since I am anal about having all my activities in my log, this could have sent me into a deep depression.
Luckily I figured out how to trick MotionBased (or any digital log). I exported a previous commute-to-school-activity as a garmin training center file, which is simply a text file that can be opened in any text processor. Each data point is time-and-date stamped, so I did a global search and replace of "04-20" for "04-14", resaved the file, imported it into MotionBased and presto, there was my ride in this morning! The time of the activity is shifted about 20 minutes since I didn't change the time-stamp but I can live with that. Also, my ride in this morning wasn't quite so fast since I kept futzing around with the power on and start buttons (not recommended while riding on Forest Ave in morning traffic).
You need to get out more.
ReplyDeleteBut now you know the trick to duplicating your 20 miler from yesterday. Do it 4X this week, change the dates, then presto! You have a 100 mile week that everyone can verify in motionbased.com!
ReplyDeleteYou lost me.....so your watch doesn't work???
ReplyDeleteHAHA!
I have actually had that problem with my Nano. It only acts up during a race. I will turn it on and sometime during the race it just shuts off on it's own. Otherwise it works great!
Luckily for me I also wear a garmen 301...you see I too am anal about my stats...hence I wear two means of recording them.
It's Ok to be anal Jeff...it set's you asside from all the others......some call it "special"