Tuesday, March 02, 2010

Don't trust your Garmin around tall buildings!




This picture shows the first couple of km of what my Garmin captured in the Tokyo Marathon versus the actual course. The original explorable map can be viewed here on my RunningAHEAD log. Zooming to the start and turning on the satellite view will soon show just how many tall buildings there are around here-- it is Nishi-Shinjuku after all. From past experience running through this area I knew the GPS data would be dodgy. For that and other reasons I took all my laps manually. This was a good move as the splits were all over-estimated and the total distance something like 43.5 km. I manually adjusted the distances after uploading to my log. Just look at that shocker of a trace...it did get much better from about 4 km, but other bad spots can be seen on the map. Just thought that might interest some of the Garmin users out there.

Note: we are proud owners of a brand spanking new iMac. This screen grab was obtained and edited with Skitch, uploaded to the Skitch host and then dropped here. All very quick and painless. This was my test post.

5 comments:

TokyoRacer said...

Either that or you were drunk at the start.

Samurai Running said...

I hope the Mac will help motivate you to write more blog posts.

Ewen said...

I like the 360 just after the start. That'd be the Garmin freaking out at the weather and wishing it had stayed in bed!

I remember one Garmin map from the Sydney Half had me out in the harbour - and it'd been ten years since I've done a triathlon ;)

Yes, more regular posts would be good - at least a couple of times a month :)

Samurai Running said...

"Don't trust your Garmin around tall buildings"

I was always follow the rule of

"Don't trust you woman around tall gaijins"

seen this Stephen

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/03/02/japan.charisma.man.comic/index.html

Samurai Running said...

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/03/02/japan.charisma.man.comic/index.html