A buddy of mine lent me his Garmin Forerunner 405 — training watch, heart rate moniter, GPS, and so on.

Now, I’m an engineer.  I’ve singlehandedly repaired major packaging machinery.

But the Garmin bested me.  I could get parts of it working from time to time.  The watch I figured out in a hurry.  The GPS I got working the first try, but since I hadn’t charged the thing, it died halfway through that run.  I got it to work all the way through on my next try.  The heart rate monitor worked fine, but the strap around my chest drove me nuts, and I never used the data.  Meanwhile, on that run I couldn’t get the GPS to work at all.  Go figure.

In the end, I had to face facts.  I do just fine with my Nike sports watch.  It tells me clock time, date, etc. — but most of all serves as my stopwatch.  That’s all I really need.  Because I’m no elite athlete.

It was really cool, though, to run with more computing power on my wrist than Neil, Buzz and Michael had at their disposal when they went to the moon.