Garmin's maiden voyage
I was very excited to get my Forerunner yesterday. It's interesting. Everyone here in blogworld told me how cool it is, and how I'm going to love it. Everyone in the "real world" just thinks I'm a nerd. But hey, what do they know...
I was very excited to take it for a spin this morning. I had to work this morning also, so I planned to run near my house. This run is on a path lined with very big trees so I wasn't sure it would actually work. Much to my surprise, it was totally fine. I also enjoyed the fact that my previously measured 1 mile route was actually 1.02 miles according to the Forerunner. So it's pretty accurate. As other people have mentioned, the lap pace while you're running is all over the place, and not accurate. You can see from the graphs above that the minute to minute pace is actually pretty useless. What is pretty cool is that for the first time I can start talking about my "splits". Setting the auto-lap to 1 mile, the Forerunner alerts me at each mile, and tells me what my time for that mile was. I now have the ability to look at the table above, and see that I (practically) ran negative splits the whole way. Pretty cool.
Another interesting thing this morning was that this was the first time I listened to a podcast. This particular one was by Steve Runner, and it was quite good to listen to. (Credit goes to Scott for linking his site.) It sounds a little crazy to listen to some guy just talk about running, but it's actually a welcome change from just listening to music. It's only about a half hour, so I went back to my regular music afterwards.
(If you check out his site, make sure to click on the mailbag link. He answers a lot of funny questions, in a sometimes corny, but usually pretty funny way.)
posted by Danny on Tuesday, September 20, 2005
7 Comments:
Mine came from Buy.com with a coupon.
I just did a quick search and they still have the cheapest price on the 201, at $115.99. The 301 is the next model up. It comes with USB connectivity and a HR monitor. Buy.com has it for $219.99.
That is a pretty amazingly cool little tool. I want one.
Good luck with the continued training, you are going to be getting to the hard part pretty soon. But then you get to taper!
Thanks for the link, btw.
Man, I'm seeing this thing everywhere --- just a matter of time before I have to have one ;)
I told you that you would love it. I am addicted to mine now...
There is another free program online that is a better interface with better layout than the logbook software that comes with the Forerunner.
Try it out:
http://www.zonefivesoftware.com/SportTracks/
I love it...it is soooo much better and the guy that wrote it is always making it better and makes changes based on peoples input. Pretty cool.
Take that mile measurement with a grain of salt. Your spits, too. I've found that my forerunner, given multiple runs on the exact same route, will sometimes read as much as 2-tenths of a mile off. Of the three different kind of "average" (mean, median, and mode), I took the mode of the multiple runs as the most accurate figure. Still... on an eight-mile run, who cares if it nails it exactly?
I know what you mean about people in the 'real' world thinking you're a nerd for wearing a triple sized watch on your wrist that hooks up to satellites. People at the office sort of look like they feel sorry for me sometimes when I come out of my office, all equipped for a run. I am also addicted to my 201 and never run without it now.
I've got the 301 and love it. Major lesson learned however -- don't get it near your iPod (not sure of other similar players). When on the same arm, or with the iPod around my neck (a shuffle), I kept losing GPS signal. Once I moved the iPod to the other arm -- not a single problem.
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