I am convinced that Hal Higdon is whispering sweet nothings in my ear when we are on a training run. Then I have to tell him, “Sorry Hal, I don’t play for your team.” This devastates him.

I’m in my second training and so far all is well. These are sort of base building weeks if you want to call it that with short long runs on the weekend. As I mentioned last week I am using Hal Higdon’s Novice 1 Marathon training app. For the most part I really like. It actually has your training schedule built in after you enter your marathon date. There are written tips for each run and verbal tips during the run. you can turn these “off” by lowering the alert volume. you can listen to your music and then type in your notes about the run after you’re done. There are the now standard social media sharing tools and charts and graphs with your goals. Overall, this is a great app. But…

As I feared going in the accuracy of the distance ran leaves a lot to be desired. This is not necessarily the fault of the app but with the GPS unit in the phone and in most smartphones altogether. I’ve used Nike, MapMyRun, and Runkeeper and all were great for short distances but when you ran more than three miles the gap widened and this was most definitely the case with the “Hal App.”

I was so fast on a couple of those miles that poor Hal couldn’t keep up. (c) Stacey Cooper

My long run on Saturday was six miles and I knew I was going to have problems. For some reason it took forever for my Garmin to pick up a signal when it normally does it instantly and the phone kept giving me the orange not quite there signal. Not wanting to wait another five minutes I started off on the run and at half a mile Hal told me I ran a mile. Oops.

When I hit 3 miles on my Garmin I was told I was done and then when I finished my well-known six mile route Hal was convinced I ran 9.48 miles at get this a 8:24 pace. I CAN’T EVEN SPRINT THAT FAST!!!!! But as you can see from my image I was happy, it was sunny, and I ran on the road. It was actually very hot and humid but I was happy. There is always something special about using your FuelBelt for the first time during a new training cycle.

I’m still feeling out the social media sharing thing. One thing that I don’t like about this is that when you have the app set to update automatically it will do so as soon as you hit your goal distance, not necessarily when you finish. An annoying first world problem when your gps in the phone is wonky and it posts you’re done when you still have three more miles to go. It will also post again when you hit done. Obviously the fix for this is to do it manually but hey first world problems here.

The app is also a huge battery drain when you use it with music. This may not be a problem for faster runners but I can see this being a problem for slower runners on longer runs. I’m still going to use/test the app for a little longer to see how accurate I can get this on a long run with a strong gps signal and also so Hal can tell me how running a marathon is like the flowers in a field.