Phone etiquette

Posted by: Gavriel Hollander

13/01/2012

Two weeks into the New Year and my marathon training has hit its first serious snag.

You see, the clever GPS app on my ‘you get what you pay for’ nowhere-near-as-good-as-an-iPhone mobile seems to have been a little generous to me.

Having been encouraged by the times I’d posted on some of my trundles around Victoria Park, I came into the post Christmas period feeling uncharacteristically good about my running. Sure, I was limping for five days after attempting to crack the 10-mile barrier but I’d been doing regular stints of 7 or 8 miles and was preparing to up my game.

So when I hooked up with marathon buddy Anjay on Tuesday night for a jog down to the Olympic stadium and back, I was dismayed to find that his on-board computer thingy (to give it its technical name) said we had done more than a quarter of a mile less than mine did.

In the spirit of scientific discovery, we synchronised watches and hit the road again before sunrise on Thursday. Maybe, I thought hopefully, Anjay had just taken the inside line on every turn; maybe he’d taken a short cut at some point, while I was busy blinking or tying a shoelace?

But the same happened again. Despite matching my friend stride for stride, Mr iPhone read 5.71 miles, while Mr Not-Quite-An-iPhone gave a confidence-boosting (but, more importantly, entirely inaccurate) reading of  5.97 miles.

Yes, I know, it’s not much. But that 4 per cent gap could mean the difference between breasting the tape on the Mall to the general acclaim of friends and family or running out of steam, like a red-faced beached whale, somewhere along the Embankment.

And what if my phone has just gone completely haywire, like Hal in 2001? What if the 50 miles it tells me I’ve clocked up since the start of December – the figure I’ve been touting around as evidence that I am, despite all predictions, taking this training business seriously – has just been plucked out of thin air?

Perhaps it’s time to harness my inner luddite and leave the technology at home. Next time, like Theseus, I’m just going to take out the longest ball of thread known to man and pray that I don’t come across any kittens on the way.