My goal is to be able to run at a steady 10 mph for 30 minutes, at which point I’ll be in good shape. I started at 8.0 mph and finished a half hour at that, and my plan is to increase my speed by 0.1 mph each time I run. I completed 8.1 mph, but 8.2 is proving a bit hard. Not because it’s much different from 8.1, but because my stomach cramps up after about five minutes, and I can keep going for another five minutes (and more after that, maybe even the whole way), but I figure I’m in pain for a reason, and slowing down is a big relief. Actually the same thing happened with 8.1, but I kept going all the way to the finish; internal organs were not happy. Something less than 8.0 mph (like 7.5) doesn’t cause this problem, so maybe, although I’m not getting tired or out of breath at higher speeds, I have to start at a slower speed and build up gradually to get the rest of my body used to the exertion.

I have my little Virgin Pulse MP3 player (128 MB model) to keep me company. Good sound quality, plenty of memory, lasts a long time on one AAA battery, has FM tuner, equalizer, and SD card expansion slot. I bought a pair of canalphones which block out most outside sound and sound almost as clear as the huge pair of headphones I have at home, but I have to wrap the cord around my neck in a very specific (and odd-looking) way to keep it from tugging on the earbuds (uncomfortable) as I run when the cord bounces. I bet I could use a bulldog clamp (that’s what those black paper clamps with folding handles are called) to solve that problem, also.

My only complaint about the MP3 player is that the software for managing song downloads to the device is buggy: It often gets stuck in the middle of a transfer and the process needs to be killed. I bought a 256 MB add-on SD card and an SD card reader, so at least I can bypass the player’s software and view the SD card as a disk drive and copy files to it using Explorer, but the USB 2.0 card reader device doesn’t cooperate well with Windows and causes some corruption in the files I copy. I’ll try hunting down better drivers, but still the downside is that I can’t access the 128 MB of memory built into the device other than through its own software.

In my experience it has been very typical that good, solid products come with lousy computer software to interface with them; the same was true with my Canon SD100 camera, though a Compact Flash card reader was a simple investment that not only made downloading pictures straightforward but gave me a transportable "disk drive" that worked right away when plugged into most computers, since Windows itself had good built-in drivers for it.