So I went to the track a calibrated the ipod today. It seems to have taken the wind out of my sails a bit, with my actual pace a little slower than I've been reporting. Still, it is a slight step up from what I was doing before I got the Vibrams. I first did a 400m calibration walk. Then, a 400m calibration run. After that, I ran a steady, quick (for me) 4km (10 laps on a 400m track). The results of the iPod were off I tiny bit, so I calibrated that run to 4km after the fact to exactly 4km.
I wasn't aware of that feature. So, with at least that one run perfectly calibrated, I held a pace of 5'30". So that is 22 seconds per kilometer off from the uncalibrated iPod. So that would come out to roughly 3.7 minutes slower in a 10k than my iPod thought I was.
Fairly steady pace. Not pushing too hard, but a bit faster than I've been running. Looking back, the last time I held that pace was June 10th, 2008: almost 2 years ago.
Both are pretty uninteresting graphs. But, I can take solace in the fact that my actual pace has come up a tiny bit, if not as much as I had first hoped. That said, it has been so much fun running almost barefoot I shouldn't even care about pace, despite all these graphs. After setting the 4km run, I wasn't sure that it fed that value back to improve accuracy. I hope it does. But in case it doesn't I ran another 2km calibration on the track. If I remember correctly, when I stopped the calibration it read 1.85km. So that would be 150m shy over 2km: 75 out of 1000 meters. 7.5% off / 92.5% accurate. That does not sound good. I've been closer with my Nikeplus accuracy in the past. I hope the second calibration got it closer to reality.
Listen to me. I sound like frickin' Rain Man, except I've probably had a math error. Someone correct me. Anyhow, the 5:30/km (8:51/mi) pace was real, it was measured. It is not very fast, but it is slightly faster than I've been, and it seems like a good place to start working on improvements.
Anyhow, glad I got out. I was faster than the 4 other runners on the track (which is kinda sad).
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