A word to the wise...

[Wickwarrunner]

I learnt a valuable lesson today whilst running W7R2 (eek, really?). I was finding it pretty hard going, was well past the half way point on the running (I.e. 12.5 mins) - too many hills! - and got my iPhone out of my pocket and unlocked it, hoping to work out roughly how long I had left. I stabbed idiotically at the screen, the light making it difficult to see the display and suddenly, to my absolute horror, the podcast jumped and I realised I'd either scrubbed it forwards or back!

I figured I'd probably scrubbed it forwards a couple of minutes and assumed I'd just keep going a couple of minutes after Laura told me to stop running. So I carried on running. And running. And running. Where was Laura? What had I done?? Eventually, just as I thought I was going to keel over and my lungs were about to burst, Laura piped up with "you are halfway through your run..." Aaaaagh! Needless to say, I stopped there and started walking. I reckon I ran for 28-29 mins by accident. I'm still alive, so that's a good thing, and my word to the wise is "don't play with your iPhone whilst running, no good will come of it".

[con-brio Graduate]

Crickey, you did a week 8 instead of a week 7 run! Congrats.

Just off out the door to do W7R2 myself, so I'll remember not to fiddle with the podcast! Thanks for the "timely" warning.

[lucykate]

Oops! I run every time with a slight anxiety of Laura disappearing on me! Luckily I know my route quite well so I know approx where I should finish, would be hard without music though!

[Landesman Graduate]

Nightmare! And it's a good point because Laura is noticeable by her absence on these longer runs.

I have now put back the audio cue on RunKeeper, so I'll have the backup of the (rather annoying) voice telling me how long I have been going for.

Having to fiddle with the iPhone halfway through is not something I want to do, especially as it's in an armband and tricky to get out. Thanks for the pointer.

[caz1_ca Graduate]

Well done that a damn good run.

Check the time on your phone just before you start running then you just have to light the screen without unlocking the phone to see the time.

[Wickwarrunner Graduate]

Thanks for all the comments! I feel like such a numpty!

Bit of advice - is RunKeeper better than Map My Run? The audio cues on that are seemingly quite random ("you have been running for 13 minutes...") I would quite like to ditch Laura now and run to playlists with decent music on them, but would want some proper cues to break in telling me how long I'd been going. Any recommendations gratefully received

[Landesman Graduate in reply to Wickwarrunner]

At least you didn't drop it! Those iPhones are as slippery as a bar of soap sometimes.

In Runkeeper you can set the interval for audio cues - eg. every 1,2,3,4,5 10, 15, 20 or 25 minutes - so that should work. I'll know for sure tomorrow.

[caz1_ca Graduate in reply to Wickwarrunner]

I had map my run app on today and at 21 minutes it piped up and said I'd done 1kilometre in 21 minutes. I think not. LOL

[greenlegs Graduate]

I wore a watch (with stopwatch setting) as well as my ipod - I had one run where I switched the ipod off (or forwards, can't remember now) by mistake, but having the stopwatch backup meant I hadn't totally lost it.