Who's a Better Training Partner...GPS or Another Runner?

After running for a few weeks without a watch to tell me how far I've gone, or how slow I'm going :-P, it's been very nice to have that little running companion again.  I've been using the Garmin Forerunner 10 for almost two weeks now, and I'm loving it.  I've reconnected with the Garmin Connect website, and I've started to take advantage of some of its features; like the training calendar, tracking other runners, and plotting routes on Google or Bing maps.

I really feel like I'm training again, and I managed to log ~29 miles last week.  I've been running with a guy I met a few weeks ago from the UK, but, unfortunately, he's quite a bit slower than I am.  It's nice to have someone to run with here, but he's easily one to one-and-a-half minutes per mile off my normal pace.  I think the slower pace has been good for me in building my endurance for long running; however, I'm at a point where I just want to run my own pace for a change.  I'm not sure if he "broke up" with me, or if he was really  tired of running in the mornings, but he told me that he was switching to running in the evenings.  We won't be running together anymore, but perhaps we'll meet up for a weekend run every  now and then.

My brother has been sticking to the training plan I sent him, and he sounds extremely excited for his first marathon in November.  I can't even describe how cool of an experience I think this will be!  I hope that the Grand Ridge Trail Race, first marathon for him and first 50 Km for me, breaks us down to nothing, and we manage to tear through the walls and finish both of our respective races.  I can already envision sitting at the finish line, completely depleted, but beaming with accomplishment and seeing the same look on his face.  This will be a great adventure to share.

Training Summary for Last Week:

Total Mileage:            28.94 miles
Total Time:                4:47:00
Average Pace:           9:55/mi
Total Elevation Gain:  1,778 ft

Happy Running!

Bye Bye FR60...We Had Some Good Times

A couple weeks ago my Garmin FR60 quit working after the battery died, which just so happened to be slightly out of the 1 year warranty date.  After a little internet research, it looks like that has been a pretty common occurrence for the FR60.  How convenient for Garmin :-(.  It's also kind of funny that it happened shortly after my relatively positive review of my running watch.

I'm not too bitter about the watch because it was basically the cheapest Garmin they make, and, to be honest, it served its purpose.  I've been running for the last couple weeks without tracking my mileage, and it's been a nice break.  Ultimately, tracking my mileage is important for me in regards to my marathon and ultramarathon training, so I decided to give another Garmin a try.  This time I bought the Garmin Forerunner 10 GPS running watch.

The Garmin Forerunner 10 is their new cheapest watch.  It doesn't have most of the crazy features many of their more expensive watches have (Garmin Forerunner 310XT, Garmin Forerunner 910XT, Garmin Forerunner 610), but it can give you your total distance, total time, mile/km splits, current pace, virtual pacer, auto-pause, and you can program a walk/run interval timer.  That's basically all that the watch does, but that's enough for me.  My biggest gripe about the watch is that you can only display two fields at once on the screen.  I'd really like to see time, distance, and pace, but you get what you pay for I guess, and I'm pretty sure that you can display three or four fields at once on all of their more expensive GPS watches; their other watches tend to be a bit bigger though.

I've only been out on two runs so far with the new watch, an 8-miler and a 5-miler, but I'm very pleased so far.  The screen display is far better than my FR60, which was often times very difficult to read while running.  Perhaps this could be seen as a 'glass half full' benefit of only being able to display two fields at once.

I'm really happy with the Garmin Connect website, and the tools and training aids they've added since I've last explored the site.  I normally keep my training log in an Excel sheet, but now I can create a training plan on my GarminConnect calendar where it automatically tracks my runs and displays my weekly and monthly totals when I plug in my watch.  The site also keeps track of your PR's for specific distances, longest runs, etc.  You also get to view a detailed map of your runs laid over a Bing or Google map, your elevation change, and a precise record of your pace throughout the run.

I plan to write a review of the watch in a couple months, after I've had sufficient testing with the watch, but at first glance I'm very optimistic that I'll enjoy my switch to the GPS side.  Now that I can record my mileage again, I'll start updating on my blog posts!

Happy Running!