Tuesday, September 9, 2025

09/09/2025 Two Years with Garmin 255

Two years have passed just like a day!

I've been running with this Garmin 255 all these days and the watch has become part of my life, part of me.

The last several months of 2023 is a turning point of my running life, not only because I had this Garmin 255, but also because I changed my way of running: I pay more attention to control my speed, pace and rythme, in perusing a better endurance. That effectively made me be able to run longer time and further in distance.

During these two years, I totaled 406 workouts and a distance of 4280 kilometers, which is almost the sum of all the runs that I did before, in 13 years! This really is incredible and I'm really prod for what I've achieved so far.

Now, I'm 5344 + 4280 =  9624 km away from Antibes where I set off.

On the map, I completed the "Antibes-Beijing, Part 1" road which is 8414 km in total. There is a small difference than the route I traced many many years ago, partly due to the fact that when I drag on the map, it is not so precise, and also, the routes today are not the same routes as years ago!

So here is the completed first part of the road:

Now, on the "Antibes-Beijing, Part 2" map, I can also put 1210 km and in fact a huge surprise is that I entered the territory of China, I'm back to China!

I passed by Urumqi, the capital of Xijiang, then Turpan and now I'm almost at Hami and I went too fast to even enjoy a bit the small and big cities.

But I will continue with excitement to complete the last 2740 km before I come back to Beijing, and it seems I'm in advance in the timing as I initially planned!


 

Thursday, August 31, 2023

31/08/2023 End of Tomtom Watch

I have been using this Tomtom GPS running watch for about 7 years. 

I replaced once at the very beginning due to defect in the watch itself, seems it overheated when charging and was unable to turn on. Then it worked quite OK. Then I replaced twice the strap once at 2018 (so the original one lasted for about 2 years), then at 2022 which is still in a quit good condition now.

However, bad news come from Tomtom a month ago or so, that the support of the running watch will stop at the end of this September, no more update of the firmware, software, no more website, no way to download data from the watch, after this date. :( 

No one to blame and nothing to complain, let's just replace it with another, probably a Gamin 255. However, let's make a summary of this period. An era ends and a new one will start.

Since last post at the new year 2023, 8 months have passed and in this period, I did 95 workouts (93 with Tomtom watch, 2 with my wife's Garmin 55) that count to 917+14=931 kilometers in total, which is quite an amazing achievement for me personally! There are still 4 months to the end of the year and I already break my yearly distance record (last year, I ran 770 kilometers in total).

So now I have done 4413+931=5344 kilometers from the starting point.

On the road, I visited the some big Iran cities, like Karaj, Qaem Shahr, and in particular its capital city Tehran! This is maybe one of the most ancient cities in the world with a lot of history. However, what surprised me is nowadays it has become a very modern city.

In Karaj, I cannot even believe my eyes when I saw this (picture from Wikipedia):


Now from September, let's go further and travel to Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan ... with my new watch.