BIG NEWS: I bought my first pair of “real” running shoes today! Yes, I fell head over heels in love with those beautiful blue Mizuno Wave Inspire 9s that I tried on this weekend (see pic below). Now, there is no way I wanted to pay $115 dollars for running shoes, but these things were hard to find on sale! I finally found roadrunnersports.com, where if you sign up to be a VIP member ($1.99 for the first year, I have to remember to cancel my membership before the price goes up!) you save 10% on all purchases. Well, here is some advice to anyone out there who ever goes shopping: retailmenot.com has coupons for everything. They had one that got me 20% off when I signed up to be a VIP member, which brought those beautiful shoes down to $93! And I get free shipping and a 90 day shoe try-out period so I can return them if they don’t feel good to run in! Now I am not happy with my feet for needing such expensive stability shoes, but I’ve got to get through this half marathon somehow, right? And my husband is supportive of me getting shoes that aren’t pink for once!
In other expensive running accessory news (I thought this was the cheapest sport to do?), I ran with my Garmin today at my favorite part of Ridley Creek State Park. I never wear my GPS watch here since there are mile markers at every 0.1 mile, but I’ve decided to wear my watch for every run so that I can track my progress online. Up until today my Garmin has been super accurate with every other route I’ve been on, but today when I got to 1 mile my watch said it was less than 1 mile…um, what? I was only doing 2 miles today to see if I could finish in under 20 minutes (plus today was randomly humid again and it was hard to breathe), so I turned around at 1 mile and pushed myself pretty hard until the end. When I got to 2 miles, my time read 19:48 (yay success!) but my distance read 1.92. It was cloudy, the entire path was shaded by trees, and there are quite a few steep hills on this course, so would any of those things cause the numbers to be different?
Any advice on my GPS issues? Has this happened to anyone before?
Mom in the Mtns 
Your Garmin should be very accurate. It may be more so than the mile markers, but the trees and clouds can interfere with it’s accuracy. Rob uses Nike Plus which tends to be slightly inaccurate, so it can happen. Have you double check the mileage on mapmyrun.com? That may help with figuring out which is more accurate, your Garmin or the markers.
Also, this is good for me to hear since a GPS watch is next on my to buy list.