The solar storm messed up my run!

You've probably been hearing about the solar flares and solar storm that have been happening on the last couple days. If you check out some articles about it, you will probably learn that it has had surprisingly little effect on GPS and technology. Well, to that I say WRONG! It totally screwed with the Garmin satellites today. Or something certainly did.

I typically turn on my Garmin just before I'm ready to leave and have a signal before I open the front door. Occasionally I need to give it a few moments on the front porch. Today I had nothing inside the house. I didn't want to stand still in the cold for long, so I decided to start out and figured I'd have a signal witin a couple blocks.

But...at Broadway (.2 miles, if I were measuring), still trying to load satellites. I passed Starbucks (about a mile from home), and nothing. I finished my two miles of warm-up still without a signal. You'd think at this point I would give up, but I kept the Garmin on just out of curiosity whether it would ever find any satellites!

I did give up on my plan for a tempo run. I would have started the tempo miles after the first two miles, and I did try to pick up the pace a bit, but without some monitoring and feedback I just didn't have the motivation for a tempo effort. So I just ran.

A bit past the four mile point (I know my route well), the Garmin finally loaded some satellites. I decided to go ahead and run it for the last couple miles. But it still wasn't working well at all. Occasionally it showed me a pace around 9:45-10:00, but mostly it jumped around from the ridiculous (6 minute pace) to the obscene (14 minute pace). Of the two miles I managed to record, the first was 11 minutes (!) and the second was 9 minutes. Yeah, that makes sense.

I'm hoping this solar stuff gets all straightened out by my next run on Saturday!


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