It's Like Sending a Kid Off to College....

.... I'd imagine anyway.

It all started last week when my Garmin was d-e-a-d before a run.  Silly me, I must've forgot to charge that puppy.  No worries, just an easy-paced run.  I have my mile markers memorized (oooh alliteration!).  Nbd. 

After charging all night and most of the rest of the next day I brought him along on my 9 mile run with new running pal.  Once the first mile passed and Mile 1 : x:xx popped up on my wrist, all hell broke loose.  My watch continued to try to lap, unsuccessfully every 2 seconds, causing a fun chirp! chirp! chirp! every 2 seconds.  Uh yeah... sorry new running buddy, I swear I'm not a dumb-dumb....  I quickly set the watch off the autolap function and figured I could just keep track of the total mileage and time and go from there.  And then it started randomly restarting itself.  Neat.

That night I set to work trying to fix the ol' G-man.  Because I'm a sweat monster, I've had quite a few problems with my watch.  Most of them are probably stemmed from the fact that I sweat a lot and I live in a very humid area (in the summer).  After taking on the 95 degree day a couple of weeks back, my watch had condensation behind the screen.  Oh nooooooooooooooos.

I tried a soft reset and downloading all the new updated firmware, as that typically does the trick.  For some reason the master reset wasn't working, and I was getting frustrated, so I called it a night.

I decided to take it out on my bike ride with Aaron on Friday.  Roughly one mile in it started it's fun lap error chirpage.  Even better, a few miles later it started chirping double time!  Because we were on a busy road, I didn't feel comfortable stopping to shut it up, so we had to deal with it.... for far too long.  Hey, at least it was still spitting out HR data!  (silver lining... there she be....)

A lovely twitter pal recommended putting it in a bag of rice to dry out the moisture inside.  Genius I tell you, genius!  I brought it to the gym to keep time for my interval run, and it wouldn't even allow me to use the lap button to record my splits.  It also couldn't be bothered to keep time in seconds, it would only do every other second.  As in, 5:50, 5:52, 5:54.  We don't deal with odd numbered seconds here folks!

Finally this morning I made one final attempt at a master reset after a 60+ hour stay in the Rice Bag Hotel, and had no luck.  I called up Garmin, explained my thoroughness in at-home trouble-shooting, and they said I'd done all I could and to send him in. 

To be honest, the details of the transaction are somewhat hazy.  It's my understanding that for $40 (what is normally $80) I will be getting a brand new watch to replace my brokey watch.  However, after doing some more digging around that kind of seems to good to be true.  Maybe I'm getting a brand new watch while they fix my watch?  I'm ok with dropping 40 bones for either option, to be honest.

So before work I marched (drove really, but marched sounds more assertive and final) to the post office to give my garmin my final (maybe??) goodbye.  We've had some good times, Garmin the Martian.  You got me through training for my first marathon.  And through 2 more suckfest 26.2s and countless races and PRs in between.  RIP (maybe?) little buddy.
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I ran 4 miles with my new running buddy Rachel this morning in 39:20.  See that, in the MORNING.  Winner winner!