I have been cutting down my mileage this year.

I want to try something new with my training.

I have come to rely on two things for the last 9 months:

1.  My Garmin Forerunner

2.  Nathan Hydration Pack

It rained last night making the morning run pretty cold for me.

It’s strange, when it rains, or when it stops raining, or when the weather starts changing to a different season – most people are not out enjoying the change.  Humans don’t like getting wet or cold I guess, they prefer to stay indoors, but for me I love it.  It is always nice to be outside on my running course where the road is empty of cars or people… it feels so calming.

I ran fives miles yesterday and twelve miles today on the CamelBak Octance XCT Hydration Pack.

This hydration pack has two front belts.  One clips just above your chest area and the other clips right below your rib cage.  The pack has a nice design to it.  And the color (mine is lime green), is nice to the eyes.

Yesterday, when I ran 5 miles, I only carried my camera on the left side bottom pocket.  I didn’t like it.  It was hard to access the camera because I couldn’t see the zipper where the pocket was.

Today, I carried the camera on the right side bottom pocket, and I had put a lot of ice cubes in the bladder.  The fit was a little tighter than yesterday because of the cubes of ice, it was tighter but still comfortable.

While running I had these problems:

• accessing the camera was difficult again
• the back of my shirt kept getting pulled up above my waist, I had to keep pulling it down over twenty times while running.  My guess is the lower belt below my rib cage was causing the problem.. I may need to adjust and loosen the tightness to stop it from causing this annoying problem.
• the hose of this hydration pack is similar to the CamelBak Fairfax hydration pack.  There IS No where to Put these hoses while running!  The Nathan 020 has a clip on the front area to prevent the hose from flying all over the place.  But where or how do I stop these CamelBak hoses from swinging all over the place while I am running?  I tried hooking the Big Bite Valve (the mouth piece) to some open loops on the front strap area but it kept coming out.
  • CamelBak should take a lesson from the Nathan corporation and attach a tube clip to its straps.
• The positioning of the hose and valve is not good while running.  The proper way to drink while running (at least for me) is to have your chin parallel to the ground or have it at a 45 degree angle or higher to the ground in order for water to flow down from your mouth to your stomach.  Have you ever tried to drink water faced-down while running?  It is not an easy thing to do.  Use the power of gravity to drink.  Because my hose was on the side loop I had to do what I just described above.  The hose is not flexible enough to just bend up and above your chin.
  • My suggestion to the CamelBak corporation is to:
    1. Create a tube clip
    2. Have your hose a bit more flexible to pull up to and above the mouth area
    3. Create a flexible mouth piece where it can swivel to certain angles like one of those straws with a flexible/swiveling mouth tube
    4. Have a hose where it recoils like a vacuum cleaner plug.  The hose could be sitting on your shoulder area on a tube clip, where I could easily pull it forward to my mouth, drink, and then pull the hose forward so it can recoil back to its original position

My thoughts now are that CamelBak hydration products were probably good and still are for hikers and walkers, Except for runners where we need goods or products in the front pockets for easy access and rhythm.  Reaching back to get something you can’t see, hydration hose flying all over the place does not make for a fun and easy run.

I think I’ll give my CamelBaks to my kids or wife to play around with.  Their colors and designs are nice, but functionality for runners gets a POOR grading from me.  I wish I could return them to REI.com for a refund but the cost of shipping is too high.  Oh well, live and learn.

I missed my run this morning due to a sports festival I had to attend at my son’s day care center.

I love running from the end of September till the end of May every year because of the flexibility it gives me to run my miles anytime in the morning or afternoon.

Anyway, getting back to the Nathan 020 Race Hydration vest, it worked out pretty well:

• it was light on my back
• I carried my Olympus 6020 Tough Stylus camera in the front pocket with no problems.  It wasn’t bouncing around.
• the pack did not heat up my back at all… and I ran with it for almost 2 hours.
• I didn’t fill the bladder with any water because of the cool weather and the short distance…. this could be the reasons for not having a bounce and for not heating up my back?
• the pack fitted nicely on my back without making any adjustments to the straps after I took it out of the box

One negative point is:

• I run with a regular arm carriage, meaning my arm swings from back to front where my hands go as high as my chest.  The left front pocket is located at my left front chest area… so my inner left wrist would rub against it.
• the problem with this rubbing is that I usually wear my watch, in this case my Garmin watch in my inner wrist… if you have been using a Garmin watch before, then you know just how sensitive the buttons are on the watch.. it is so easy to activate these buttons.
• eventually I stopped and moved the watch to my outer wrist area so I wouldn’t accidentally press any of the buttons… it worked out well.

This is the best pack so far for carrying my camera… I may use it the most out of all the packs I bought.