Watch Out

Taper taper taper. I ran 4.3 miles tonight. This was a very common distance for me pre-marathon; I've run this course a lot. I wanted to build up my confidence week, so I decided I would try to run it quickly. And I did. As I was approaching the finish line (a stop sign in Griffith Park) I was thinking "this might be a Personal Best for me at this distance." When I crossed the line I quickly tried to stop my watch timer, but somehow I hit the wrong button. I put the watch into some sort of "Set Timer Mode". I could see the little stopwatch icon blinking so I knew the time was still ticking away, but for the life of me I couldn't figure out how to get the watch back into normal mode.

I started hitting all the buttons in every possible order and eventually managed to reset the watch and stop the timer. But I have no idea how much time I spent futzing with the watch. Twenty seconds? Probably more. A minute? Probably less. The Rules state that when I log my time, I have to round up, so ultimately I had to subtract just 20 seconds from the clock time. (The more time I actually spent on the watch, the faster my run time would be.)

Had I subtracted 60 seconds, I would have been very close to beating my Personal Best. But rules are rules, so it doesn't count.