Today my Garmin Forerunner 245 says that my workout was productive…..

For years I had a different Garmin and it died a couple of months ago. So I bought its replacement the 245. The 245 has the heart rate monitor built in and does everything else I could imagine me wanting it to do… so even though it was a supposed step down from my old 620… it seems an upgrade.

The funny thing is that this new watch has some program in it that analyzes my training and tells me how I am doing. It could say “productive, or peaking, or overreaching, or unproductive, or detraining…” there may be more….. as I was in my last few weeks of training for the Revel Big Cottonwood Marathon it kept giving me negative feedback… most days it either said unproductive or overreaching. I was wondering whether it had enough history to tell….. but it is Garmin, it has decades of workouts to draw from on Garmin Connect.

In spite of the feedback I BQ’d and got myself into Boston. Since then, it has been positive… It has said recovering mostly… the last couple of days it said peaking… not sure if that was good… today it says productive! Yeah…

The last two days have been good workouts. Yesterday we did the Hillview 2×4 trial. I ran it as a tempo workout for all 4 miles, pushing the pace. I beat all of my kids…. this is not good, it means that I don’t have any upper echelon boy runners this year… they are good, but I should have a few that are way faster than me…. and I don’t. Anyway, I ran the almost 4 mile, hilly loop in 29:45. A couple of weeks before the marathon I ran it a few seconds faster. These are my two fastest times ever on this strava segment. (I did not run this particular segment back in 2010-2013 heydey running…)

Today we ran to Jamba Juice… and I made them do half mile intervals all the way! Of course that meant I was running half mile intervals up near the front of the pack…

September was a solid month for me, but not crazy. I ran 121 miles – including the marathon and I Elliptigo-d 11 miles… 1 mile at a time. I am up to only 659 running miles for the year. It seems that I do well on not so much training….