Stupid Garmin

I usually love my Garmin Speed/Distance System (even though it's an earlier incarnation of the one that everyone else has now...that's right, I was doing it before it was cool). It truly is my best friend when it works the way that it is supposed to work. Last week, we were in harmony and everything went very smoothly on my long run. This week, we were not only out of synch, but we weren't even singing the same song.
My run was over my usual five out, five back course...and I was going to add an extra mile onto the end of the course to make up my twelve for today. At about the 3.75 mark, I looked down to check my pace and to my horror, noticed that the pace was missing from my screen. I immediately checked my arm GPS receiver and realized that somewhere along the line, my signal had dropped. This sucked hard core. I kept running while trying to convince my somewhat temperamental piece of technological crap to suck it up for a few more miles. Yeah, it finally kicked back on at the normal ending point for my run. I lost at least 1.25 miles there, maybe more.
So being the smart cookie that I am, I thought I'd just try to run the extra mile out and hopefully the signal would hold strong for another nine or ten minutes and then I'd turn around and run back to the car and be close enough to twelve miles to call it a done deal. Of course, little Garmin crapped out on me another couple of times during this last mile. I ran at least twelve miles today, but maybe closer to thirteen or fourteen...who knows.
Despite the numerous issues with the Garmin (which dear husband feels may be due to me needing new batteries...apparently the rechargable batteries are not meant to last for two or three years, who'd have thunk.) the run went okay. I was a lot slower (a whole 48 seconds slower than I was last week) but it was also about fifteen degrees hotter. My ankle felt pretty good the whole run, but is slightly sore now. I plan on doing an easy three miles tomorrow and then icing good the rest of the day, so whatever was going on with the ankle seems to be improving and is now squarely placed in the "not serious" injury category.