W8R2 and a question for any techies out there!

I completed W8R2 last night. The weather was crisp with clear skies which were darkening quickly.

For this run, I again used the podcast, despite having made a playlist this morning. I was visiting a friend and because I don't run with a phone, watch, GPS or anything else to track my times and distance, I needed Laura to tell me when my 28 minutes was up, especially as I was running on unfamiliar routes.

I found this run quite tough - I felt like I was doing it just to get it over and done with, rather than deriving any pleasure from it. As with W8R1, my lack of planning a route before I went for the run meant I was double-backing on myself and trying to figure out which street to go down next so I could continue without arriving back at the house too quickly. This was frustrating, but also showed me how far I've come in that my distances have begun to increase.

Overall the run was ok. I completed it but am quite ambivalent about it.

My goals for W8R3 is to plan and plot a completely new route and perhaps get another long sleeved fluro top as I am sick of washing the other one!

I think at this stage, I also really need to start recording how far I have ran and speeds etc because so far I've largely been running "blind", not really knowing what distance I've completed other than a quick post-run plot on googlemaps, which I realy don't believe is accurate enough. I seem to be covering 4.3km in 28 minutes but I'd like to know this for definite so I can work on distance and speed when I graduate as I think it will be a useful component to keep me motivated.

Can anyone recommend a good value-for-money device which would help me with this? I'd ideally like something which fastens round my wrist as I don't like carrying anything, and I don't like smartphones!

[Mitts Graduate]

I'm no techie but see my Garmin question for lots of advice from people who are - I'm either going to get a Garmin Forerunner 110 or 10.

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I love my Garmin forerunner 410 watch, it is so useful when on my run as I can see at a glance how far I've run, so I often go and run new routes and don't set off back until 2.5k.