It is rather amazing to me how much difference there is in my sleep quality between when I wear my Garmin watches and when I don’t. I slept soundly last night without the darn thing on and it really reinforced to me that perhaps all the added features that smart watches have, are not the best thing for everyone or myself. So, all three of the old Garmins will be history sooner than later. That way I don’t keep trying to make something work, that I have shown doesn’t work for me when it comes to the quality of sleep or keeping things simple.

Enough on that subject.

I planned to do at least 30:00 minutes outside, if it didn’t get too hot, too quickly, after picking up groceries.

I ended up running for 30:42 and felt fine in shade, but on any longer sunfields it got into the 80’s pretty quickly. Going out on this course is great, with it being mostly downhill, which makes the first mile split of 9:41 rather false, but it still makes the ego proud. The second mile is mostly uphill and when you add in a telephone gap walk to get my breath after making it up the hill to the upper gate, it was not quite as ego building at 11:26, but I redeemed myself with a 9:35 last mile.

Overall, I was quite happy with the run, making it back up Stevens Hill was one of the big goals I had for the run, so I accomplished that. Then having two sub 10:00 miles was just gravy. Since I have basically been running 11:00 to 12:00 minute paces pretty regularly, with some pace work to end runs, but nothing sustained as this fast a pace. So, yes I am happy with how I did today.

This probably is only the third outside run I have done this year, because I have been babying the left knee while trying to get it back into running shape. Today, it did not grumble at all during the run.

Progress!!!!

And yes, running outside is so much different running on the treadmill. But with the knee behaving itself, perhaps it is time to begin running outside more often. Something I really prefer to do, but have been meechy about actually doing too often.

You notice that I didn’t include my mileage. Without the Garmin’s GPS capability I don’t have any way to accurately guess what the mileage was. Although I know where the mile and 2.0 mile marks were, so I have a pretty good idea that it was a little over 3.0 miles. Without the Garmin’s GPS, I’ll probably focus more on time, than mileage for my training. Which is what I did for most of 2026 anyway.