Running Shoe And Electronics Reviews!

I find reviews of running shoes and GPS devices funny. Now I am sure, part of this comes from the fact that when I started racing, you would come thru the chute and get a numbered popsicle stick, go over to a table where someone manned a clipboard, and have them write down your age and place so that they could figure out age group awards. Now we have timing chips embedded in race numbers, and within minutes from your finish, your data has been sent to your cell phone. And shoes were heavy, often leather, and the cushioning was pretty much absent. And having a stop watch BUILT INTO YOUR REGULAR WATCH was a technological marvel. Yah I know, 38 running years later, and I am a dinosaur.
I bring this up now for two funny reasons. Two of my three ancient garmin GPS devices have died. After 5-7 years, the internal batteries no longer hold charges even for an hour. So I wanted to buy a new one, and went on to amazon to shop. Now this model, the 310XT, first came out in 2009, but it does pretty much all the same stuff as the newer expensive ones, but at a bargain price. And the information gets sent via an ant stick attachment into your computer via blue tooth. Now, I used it today and it was flawless. It found the satellite connection instantly, worked flawlessly on my run, has a soft comfortable heart rate chest strap, and the data transferred in three seconds to my apple laptop. When I opened the data download, it had all the splits recorded with times and heart rates during the splits, as well as average total pace and heart rate. All the data you could ever possibly use. You can also, utilizing existing data, make training suggestions for future workouts. Now, of the 500 plus reviews on amazon, about a hundred were just whining bullshit.....The watch is too large, it takes too long to get satellite reception, the HRM makes my chest sore, the bluetooth transfer of information takes three minutes on my computer, blah blah blah. They have more accessible valuable training information then most could ever use. They can do all kinds of workouts and speedwork without ever having to visit a track. Just a bunch of whining bitches!
On the shoe front, there are more varieties of shoes in different drops, all with space age lighter materials, that have never been seen before. You can pretty much dial your running style to a number of possible shoe choices. And there are great shoe review blog sites (the best being runblogger.com) that allow you to figure out the best shoes for you. And running shoe warehouse gives you great deals on shoes, plus allows you to plug in the size of any shoe you are running in to tell you what size to select on the shoes you want to buy. An amazing time to be a runner.....
Had two good runs of 10K so far this week. One included an 8, 7, and 6 minute set of cruise intervals, the other, three intervals of 4 minutes at 5 Mile pace, followed bye a 10 minute interval at 10 mile race pace. Tomorrow I will do an easy recovery run, and then try another long run on sunday. Starting to get the beginnings of a training effect again....