Tag Archives: running app

You ever have that déjà vu feeling? You know, like a particular event has happened in the same way, or a moment in time seems so familiar that you would swear that you were reliving it again? Like the movie Groundhog day, when Dan Aykroyd keeps reliving the same nightmare of a day over and over again; awakened by the same Carpenters song and then being denied breakfast at the local fast-food restaurant because he was one minute past the end of the breakfast menu serving time?

This is similar, just not quite as entertaining. I’m referring to the inaccuracy of my GPS running app; namely MapMyRun. We’ve had this discussion before, have we not? Don’t answer that, because I KNOW we have, in fact, it was on a blog post of mine dated October 3, 2014 in which my app had me running some ridiculously insane 2 minute mile pace, and teleporting me several city blocks in the matter of seconds. Yeah, you remember, this one.

Well, it’s happened again, only this time my autonomously thinking unit of twentieth century technological advancement had me not only instantaneously moving several hundred yards like some iconic comic book hero (Flash!—Ahhhh!), but also running right across the Sacramento River, like, on the top of the water. Quite a feat, I must say. However, while I may be loved my many and revered by fewer yet, I am not Him.

OK, I probably dated myself with the Flash Gordon reference, but you get the point. It is what it is, and I am what I am… a middle-aged man, but alas, merely a mortal man. I cannot leap from city block to city block, nor can I walk on water, so either GPS technology needs to catch up with the times, or I need to live up to the unreasonable physiological standards set by GPS cell phone running apps and the notoriously misguided “pinging” of their allied cellular towers. Ok, people. If we can disguise a cellular transmission tower to look like redwood tree, we can surely develop technology worthy of its camouflaging as one of God’s miraculous creations.

Remember the pager? You know, back before everyone had a cell phone clipped to their belt, or stashed sleekly into their hip pocket? It beeped when someone called you and displayed their telephone number on a tiny LCD screen so you could call them back to find out why they were calling you.  Yeah, OK, I had one too back in the day. The one I had was one of those early big square gray models with one big white button on the top. Only paid $10 for it. The “pager store” (yes, before cell phone stores, there were pager stores) I bought it from sold it to me for cheap because they were doing away with that particularly obnoxious design and were about to chuck the lot of what remained of their stock. The thing was a beast, the size of a TV remote and only had two settings; a succession of four LOUD dual beeps, and a vibrate mode powerful enough to keep a lonely person entertained for hours calling themselves.

I only bought it to communicate with a young woman that I met on the city bus a few days earlier so that we could coordinate the occasional rendezvous. Anyway, as the dinosaur giant pager contraption went away in the ‘90’s, so will this GPS thingy at some point, replaced with a hologram of a 3D virtual environment hovering over our head while we run, like the rings of Saturn encircling our cranium with a constant stream of data (current pace—average pace—time—miles—calories burned, etc.) like the perpetually rotating ticker on the New York Times building in Times Square. But, until that happens, c’mon techies! Let’s pick up the technological pace here with these inaccurate and increasingly frustrating gadgets once and for all. Some IT tweeker out there needs to put down the pipe and come up with a GPS app that actually works in a manner for which it is designed, before I’m too old to run anymore and all I’ll need it for is to guide my wheelchair to and from the bathroom.

May your motion be perpetual and your integrity held high, my friends.