My wife and I just returned from an Inside Passage cruise that started in Vancouver, BC, and ended in Anchorage, Alaska. As the Long Beach Marathon was only seven weeks away, I, of course have to keep up my training. Fortunately, the ship we were on, the Vision of the Seas, has a 10th deck almost fully devoted to running/walking, and it appeared to be about three laps per mile.
Fortunately, I had my electronic running buddy, my Garmin GPS wrist watch, so I knew I would be accurate to the closest one-hundredth of a mile. Due to my engineering background, however, I was afraid I wouldn't get full credit for the relatively tight turns at the front and back (that's fore and aft in nautical terms for us landlubbers) of the ship. For example, one could run in a tight, five foot diameter circle for three hours, yet the GPS might not show any distance, as the circle would be too small for the GPS to known you had ever budged.
I was also concerned over being able to get satellite reception in the "middle of nowhere", and indeed the first day that we were underway, far from sight of land, I turned it on, and it kept searching and searching for a satellite, but nothing happened. Suddenly, however, a screen came up that said "Are you more than 200 miles away from where you last used this device?" I quickly entered "Yes" and then after a brief pause it found a signal and I was indeed ready to start. It was very cold outside, and as I was the only idiot in shorts and a tee shirt on deck, I was very happy to finally start running.
I typically have the GPS set to alarm every time I've gone a mile, yet suddenly after 2 minutes, 35 seconds, the alarm started ringing. Now any of you who've seen me run, know that not only do I not run 2:35 pace miles, I don't typically even run 10:25 miles, at least not at marathon training pace. Thinking that perhaps the satellite thing was still calibrating, I continued speeding around and around the ship, and sure enough, less than three minutes later the one mile alarm went off again.
However, only at this point did I suddenly recognize what the problem was..............the damn cruise ship was moving forward at 15 knots!!!! So much for engineering logic and my concern over a tight radius on the ship.
I can, however, now lay claim to having run a 2:35 mile. I bet even Chuck, Todd, Emmett, Stacy and all the AREC speedsters can't make that claim!