Happy New Year to everyone. I hope you started the year positively. Personally, I celebrated the start of 2017 with a 20 km yesterday, and the same today. So I’m off to a flying start. If things go smoothly, I should be in reasonable form for the King Island 32 km race in March, and even better form for the Big Red Run in June. Well, that’s the plan. By the way, I totalled 5,575 km last year.

My new Garmin watch is now working well, except for the issue I mentioned in the last post. In fact, the altitude measurement is so pathetic, it’s simply not worth using at all. Yesterday I did a run that I knew to involve about 150 metres of cumulative ascent. However, the new watch measured it close to 1500 metres – a ten fold error. Thankfully, once downloaded, the Garmin web site retrospectively uses pre-collected accurate GPS data to give a proper measurement. And in this case it came out at 146 metres – virtually exactly what I expected. So at least I know I can get an accurate reading after I’ve finished running.

A quick update on other runners – Serge Girard will finish his run across Australia tomorrow. And Tony Mangan is back on the road in China on his walk around the world. Unfortunately, Tony had to make an unscheduled trip back to Ireland for his brother’s funeral.

To start the year, I thought I might post a few photos of one of my favourite parts of my world run – the California coast. I’ve already posted many of these, but the ones you’ll see over the next little while are all never-before-seen. This one was taken about 100 km south of San Francisco, very early in my North American leg.