Ever notice how gear emergencies only seem to happen right before you have a big run planned? Remember the whole GPS watch debacle? And now this!
Oh, it wasn’t so bad. But the universe does like to have fun.
A couple weeks ago I took a trip to Ocean City, MD for an annual vacation with Pat’s family. Ocean City has a pretty sweet boardwalk that makes for a great running venue, and has much cooler mornings than my home base in Puerto Rico. I figured my week in OC would be the perfect staging location for a practice half marathon.
I packed accordingly: KT Tape, Clif shots, my bigger water bottle for long runs, the works. And of course, my cheap but trusty sport headphones. Sure, they were 3.5 years old, but what were the odds of them fritzing on me now?
The funny thing is, they didn’t fritz. They bitz. What? Ahem. I mean they separated into bits. Look!
I don’t know what the problem was exactly but one of the earpieces just came off. And I needed the earpieces. That’s the one complaint about this headphone model: I could never get them to stay in my ears on their own without shoving them right down what the internet assures me is called the preauricular pit aka my earhole, and if I did that I heard an annoying rubbing sound the whole time. So I had to keep them in with a buff around my head. Stylish! (Functional.)
Obviously not having one earpiece didn’t seem like it would be helpful. I thought about attempting to jury-rig a replacement but ultimately ended up doing the only thing that could be done: I made an emergency trip to the nearby Target.
It may surprise you to know that billion-dollar corporation Target does not sponsor this blog, but believe it, because I want you to know how sincerely and non-monetary-compensation-arily I mean this: THANK YOU, TARGET. They had a whole variety of headphones available, many sport-specific, at a variety of price points. I wound up grabbing the JLab headphones pictured above for like $30.
And, bonus! They’re a total upgrade so far. For starters, they stay in my ears without help. My last few runs have been buff-free and from a hot and muggy San Juan morning perspective, that is NICE. They also tell you if the state of the battery when you first turn them on, which is awesome; with my old pair, I had to make an educated guess based on how many hours I’d run since the last charge. Will they last as long as the old pair? Time will tell, but for the time being I am 100% satisfied with my purchase.
I wish I could say the same for my practice half, which was average. But it WASN’T silent and that’s almost more important, am I right?
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