Being a runner just got a lot funner
August 27th, 2008 Posted in fitness, gadgets, review, service
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For most people, it’s hard to find the motivation to run for the sake of getting in shape. People have their own ways of making in more interesting bearable, such as listening to music, running with other people, joining running clubs and what have you. I, however, find my motivation from viewing the running experience like an opportunity to gather data! About what you ask? everything really, as long as it can be gathered reliably and you are able to make pretty graphs of progress afterwards. Therefore, the choice of running watch is clear…feature-wise the biggest M***** F***** money can buy! And so it became and without further ado I present to you the…
Garmin Forerunner 405
Garmin Forerunner 405 is the newest addition to the Forerunner series. It has a GPS built in, so all your runs can be viewed on a Google Map afterwords and while you are running it fairly accurately shows you pace, distance, acceleration, deceleration, heart rate etc.. It has tons of metrics it can track and these can of course be visualized after your run and compared to all your previous runs (yes, this means hours in front of the computer after your run…and that’s real motivation!).
Now I owned the previous model, the Forerunner 305, so should you upgrade? If you’re smart no! because the only thing I have noticed that have changed in the new 405 version is looks and speed to GPS acquisition, which comes at a pretty steep price (~$200 or DKK 1.000,-). Style costs, even when for runners.
Visualizing your runs
As mentioned the information you can gather with a Garmin Forerunner watch is comprehensive and ranges from speed, pace, distance, elevation, heart rate, cadence and much more. The current additional web service, Motionbased, which comes free with the watch lets you really dig into the data. An example can be seen below.
One of the really neat (in a nerdy kind of way) is that you can map your runs visually, which is especially fun if you, like me, travel a lot and get a chance to run in interesting (and not so interesting…) cities around the world. While I don’t have a good example from Motionbased, below you can see an old run I did in Copenhagen earlier this year.
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