The accomplishment of today’s workout made me feel like a badass.  Not how I performed, or the feeling when I finished (although it’s always a good feeling).  No, this time getting started made me feel like a badass.  More than usual even.

Why?  Because I overcame golden excuses to bail out.  I motivated myself to go for my run, got down to the spot along the road where I usually warm up and found out that my Garmin was dead.  Boom.  Excuse to turn around and go home.

Instead, I pulled my phone out of my Spibelt and downloaded MapMyRide.  Now, I’d had this app on my phone previously, so I had an account already, but I’d never used it so I deleted it a while back.  Now, I put it back on my phone, logged in and for the first time ever I used it to track a workout.  Boom.  Excuse eliminated.

So I put my phone away, fired up my bluetooth headphones and took off with MapMyRide running.  Aaaannnnnd before going 600m I promptly found that my planned run route was flooded.  Four to six inches of water covering a good 50m of road.  Boom.  Excuse to turn around and go home.

Instead I turned around, ran down a road I’d never run down before and connected up to my planned route a little further down where there was no water.  Boom.  Excuse eliminated.

Right around that point is when my bluetooth headphones and phone music playlist combined to a) be uncomfortable and unstable [the headphones] and b) play crappy music, not follow the playlist and generally avoid effective user interface (phone).  Boom.  Excuse to turn around and go home.

Instead I shut off the music, put the headphones in my pocket and agreed with myself to run without musical accompaniment.  Boom.  Excuse eliminated.

Now, let’s face it.  On a badass scale of 1 to 10, overcoming these “obstacles” and doing a 5K run is probably somewhere between 0.5 and 0.8.  But you know what?  I don’t care.  I did a workout in the face of numerous easy outs and did the right thing when it would have been easy to wuss out and do nothing.  That’s enough badassery to celebrate.

Here are some screenshots from MapMyRide.  I am considering using this a little more to see what kind of functionality it has.  Especially since I routinely leave my Garmin turned on when I come home and don’t find out until I try to turn it on before I start running.  It does have more adds and falderal than Garmin Connect but it might be worth trying.  It’s clearly worth having around as a back-up data collection method.