In the lower right corner of the screen you see four standard
calculator buttons: +, -, *, and /, which allow you to
perform addition, subtration, multiplication, and division, respectively. What is
unique to The Athlete's Calculator is that these operations work on times
expressed as hours:minutes:seconds as well as they do on "regular" numbers,
and furthermore, whenever they are used to modify a number, the other fields are
modified appropriately.
Let's take an example. Suppose you read in a book of training advice that you should
"do your long runs at a pace 30% slower than your 10K race pace." Let's
start by assuming you know your most recent 10K time, but not the pace. First calculate
your pace as described in Chapter 1 - enter the time and distance, and press Calculate.
Your screen should look like this:
Because you now want to modify the pace, tap on Pace to make it the active
field. Next tap the * button, followed by 1.3. What you'll see at this
point is shown at the left. The pace field is active and is enclosed by the large
round-cornered rectangle, which lets you know that it is the field that is about
to be modified. At the same time, your mini-calculator number appears just below
the Calculate button, enclosed by a smaller roujd-cornered rectangle of its
own to show you that that is the number you're currently entering.
Now when you press Calculate, two calculations are actually performed. First,
the pace is multiplied by 1.3, as you requested with your calculation. Then the software
proceeds with a recalculation. Because it doesn't make sense to recalculate pace
from the time and distance (that would negate the effect of the multiplication!),
the program instead recalculates the time:
At this point you have learned that if your 10K time is 42:10, your long run pace (according to this advice) should be 8:49/mile. You also see how long it would take you to run a 10K at that pace, but that probably isn't of interest. What you really want to know is how long it's going to take you to run your 20-mile run at that pace. To find out, change the distance units to miles, tap on Distance, enter 20, then tap on Calculate, and here's what you'll see:
Your 20-miler should take you just under 3 hours at the recommended pace.
You can use the calculator function buttons repeatedly, just like a real calculator,
without hitting the Calculate button. For example, suppose you have just run
a series of 400-meter intervals on the track, in times of 72.6, 73.4, 75.2, 72.8,
73.1, and 71.6. What was your total time spent running?
Press Clear All if you need to reset the calculator; that will also make Time
the active field. Now enter 72.6, tap +. You should see this:
Note that as the time was entered, it was automatically converted from 72.6 seconds to one minute, 12.6 seconds. Now enter 73.4 and tap + again. The program will add your two times, and, since the last key you pushed was + and not Calculate, the mini-calculator is still active and ready for you to enter the next number:
Continue by entering: 75.2+72.8+73.1+71.6. At the end, since you're done, tap the Calculate button to show the final total and de-activate the mini-calculator.
With version 2.0 of the PalmPilot OS, which is included with the PalmPilot Personal and PalmPilot Professional, you can reassign the standard buttons on the Pilot to start applications of your own choosing. If you want, you can reassign the "Calculator" button so that when you press it, The Athlete's Calculator (AthleteCalc) will be run automatically.
Although The Athlete's Calculator doesn't duplicate every function of the regular calculator, it can be used (as discussed above) to do basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. The only "trick" is that if you want to use it for such "regular" calculations, you'll want to make sure to use the Distance field, not the Time field which will be active by default when you first open the calculator. So if you want to use The Athlete's Calculator to add up a series of four numbers and then multiply the sum by 1.0725 (to add tax, for example), here's how you would do it:
The Athlete's Calculator does have several limitations when used as a calculator; these are discussed in the next section.
The Athlete's Calculator is designed to deal with time, distance, and pace - all by definition are positive numbers. If you use the subtract function of the Mini-calculator and the result would be negative, the result is set to zero instead.
If a calculation results in a number too large to be displayed in the available space (or if you try to enter too many digits into any field), the field is reset to zero, and three warning beeps are sounded to let you know about the problem.
Any attempt to add, subtract, multiply, or divide by zero is simply ignored.
Precision is limited to two digits.
Copyright 1997 by Stevens Creek Software
All Rights Reserved