I must've been a good girl this year because Santa brought me some cool new running gear.

First, I got Yak Tracks. As I said in my "Life and Her Times" blog entry yesterday -- if I'd have known how awesome these things are, I'd have bought them a decade ago. I had seen other runners using them and always thought they looked sort of medieval -- like something some hermit-dwelling, mountain-main invented to help him track down a yak to cook over his open hearth for dinner.

Slippery conditions, running friends and my aging body convinced me to give them a try. I strapped those suckers on for a five-mile run on Christmas Day because the roads -- and especially the berms -- near my house were still sort of snow covered and icy.

I loved them. I had traction and confidence and all the coiled up wire was not uncomfortable at all -- even when we were on dry roads.

I also got a Garmin 205 that gives me all kinds of cool data about my run. It keeps the time, distance, calories burned and pace per mile. It can be set to record your splits so you can see how you do mile-by-mile and it keeps a log of all your workouts and can give you "reports" on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. The 205 even comes with a setting for a "virtual partner" so you can compete against a little runner on your wrist. Sounds sort of silly, but I'll reserve judgment until I actually try it out.

There's also some whole part about maps, but that technology will be lost on me because well, I don't care to spend time figuring it out.

So, now that I've got my iPod, my Yak Tracks and my Garmin -- I am one geeked-out runner.

Not necessarily a faster runner, but a waaaaayyyy cooler one.