Posts Tagged ‘serfas’
I didn’t read “The Catcher in the Rye” until I was in my late twenties, after I had served in the military and completed a couple years of college, so I bring a different perspective to the novel than most readers, who are probably teenagers and have read it in high school. Suffice it to say that I didn’t experience the spiritual revelations, nor do I share the literary reverence, that the novel seems to inspire.
Everybody knows the story: After getting booted out of prep school for bad grades, Holden Caulfield, the teenage hero of the novel, ventures into the wilds of New York City during the Christmas holiday. Apparently in search of himself and a meaning for his life, everywhere he goes he finds fakes, frauds, and phonies. He has some kind of nervous breakdown and ends up in a rest home talking to an analyst — which is where he’s been all along while telling his story. Holden is a likeable character, a well-meaning dolt with a big heart, and some of his observations are hilarious; and although the plot gets somewhat tedious after awhile, the revelation at the end of the novel — that Holden is in a rest home — ties everything together in a simple, plausible conclusion.
A few years later, I tried to read “The Catcher in the Rye” again — and couldn’t get past Chapter 4. Why? It wasn’t the famous swearing that irritated me; the too-many instances of “goddam this” and “goddam that” are annoying enough, but they fit Holden’s character as perfectly as his red hunting hat. It wasn’t Holden’s sarcastic remarks and observations that annoyed me; teenagers talk like that, and Holden is, after all, a teenager. The problem is, after all those years, Holden was still a teenager. Some characters seem to grow and mature with you; and when you return to them again in later years, they seem to reflect your own maturity and experiences. But Holden was still what he was before: a whiny, annoying, irritating smart-ass. I shelved the book and haven’t opened it since.
Serfas Carma Bicycle Saddle
Before getting a Garmin, my previous way of tracking runs was to use a Polar 6 heart rate monitor (to track calories burned and also get a sense of how hard I was working) and use the RunKeeper app on my iPhone, which I always take with me on runs (for the music.) I thought this was a “good enough” system because the Garmin was just way out of my price range. Well, then Amazon had this huge sale on the 305 and I’d gotten some money for the holidays, so I decided to give it a shot.
Here’s what I love:
-the accuracy of the mapping
-being able to see on a clear display my exact pace, heart rate, distance and time spent running (kind of hard to do that with an app when you wear your iPhone in an armband.
Here’s what keeps me from throwing a parade in the Garmin 305’s honor:
-it’s clunky
-the calories burned part is just based on your weight and distance, not your heart rate (even though it will DISPLAY your heart rate) which can’t be as accurate as the Polar monitor. The fact is, I was the same weight six months ago and ran the same distance, but I burned a lot more calories then because I wasn’t as seasoned a runner; the more you do something, the easier it becomes and the fewer calories you burn, so the idea that I could burn 350 calories for a 3 mile run (my Polar 6 would show me burning 250-275 for the same distance) without sprinting the whole way seems off to me.
-I don’t find it that easy to use. I needed to have a few friends show me the basics. But I’m not that tech savvy. Still, in an age of touch-screen everything, this technology feels very DOS-like to me.
I still am thrilled that I purchased this! And I bring it on every run.
Serfas Beacon Bicycle Taillight | elderjusticecoalition