Goodbye, old friend...

Well, it seems as though my relationship with my first gen black iPod Nano has finally come to an end. My husband suggested several days ago that I spend some of my bonus money (which I got today's pay check) on a new Nano. I said, no, that would be silly, I'll just use my old one until she finally passes on to the wild blue yonder before I bring in a younger, cuter model. I owe it to her. I remember the day I got her...

I ordered my first Nano during the training for my first marathon, the Nike Women's Marathon, with Team in Training. Before that, I was using a Sony portable no-skip sports CD player; a big, bulky thing, but it carried me through many a short run, blaring my Silvertide, Jet, or The Killers CD as I made my way around the LSU lakes. But, like a best friend in elementary school, I began to outgrow my CD player. Even my short runs were becoming so long that I had to listen to the CD more than once. So, I got my Nano. I managed to convince my mom that it was a great idea to go ahead and let me order it and have them pay for it as a birthday present, even though I ordered it in October and my birthday is in December. I remember my mom saying that she thought it sounded like "a spoiled brat" present. This is, of course, when MP3 players were still a relatively unknown technology to my family, and the thought of being able to carry around your entire music collection just seemed excessive to my mom.


But I convinced her to let me order it, and we spent many a long run together. We trained for that marathon, three half marathons, a 5K, and began training for another marathon before she finally began to fade. The Nike+iPod David gave me a year ago for my birthday made her the perfect running companion on both solo and group runs. Then, recently, she's been acting strangely, and her screen has a shade of burnt orange creeping in on the right side. And last night...every time a song finished, 10 seconds into the next song the Nano would completely restart, little gray apple screen and everything. This makes a 40 minute run
pretty frustrating, escpecially in the freezing cold when I'm wearing gloves, and it's difficult to use the little buttons.


So, I say goodbye to my old friend today, and hello to a new one I plan to purchase this afternoon: the new, flashy pink version of the iPod Nano. I can already tell we're going to be great friends, too.