GPS Spontaneous Travel and Running

As you may know, I recently got a GPS In Car Navigation System. One thing I don't think they go a very good job of is marketing one of our favourite features which is the ability just to drag and plonk you finger on the map and let it take you there, i.e. Spontaneous Route Calculation (or SRC).

We have two rules for SRC which are:

1. Near a beach

2. Near a coffee/bakery place

Yesterday, we ended up on the North Shore picnicking on a cool beach near Brown's Bay..

Before this (and maybe we are just lazy) we would have struggled to find somewhere and plot our course without a bit of hassle. Being able to decide where you're going when you're in the car and then get there is fantastically liberating. I just love the fact that Tommy is getting to see a different beach nearly every week. There is always good coffee and parks near the beaches and it makes me realise that Auckland is such a great city to live in!

After our beach trip we then traveled back to St Heliers beach and we saw loads of runners along Tamaki Drive as the Auckland Marathon is coming up and it was pretty sunny yet windy, perfect conditions.  I rushed home to get my gear and had a fantastic run along my favourite road in Auckland, Tamaki Drive. It stretches from the city right along the eastern bays over around 17km of beach front. You can see the run below, I ran from St Heliers beach (where Annabel was playing with Tommy, towards the city and then back to St Heliers, covering around 12km, my longest run ever! I was very slow, covering it in 1hr 15m, but there are 8 weeks to go until the Marathon (I'm going to do the half marathon, yipes!) so plenty of time to improve.

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One thing I always want is to be able to know my pace and exertion levels, so I've gone a bit mad (Annabel sighs when I'm like this) and got a GPS wristwatch from the same people that made the in car system to help with my running efforts. It's very cool and beeps alarms if you're running too slow or not hard enough. You can also upload your runs into the software and then import them into Google maps to get print outs of your runs like above, very cool.