Equipment Review

As promised, an update on my Garmin Forerunner 405.

I love the watch. I'm still not using a fraction of its capability, but I love it. I've been playing with some of the 'workout' features. Today I did some intervals: 0.5 miles with 2 minute recoveries between. It took all of about 2 minutes to program ahead of time and it was pretty easy to use.

I had one 'oops'. After hitting the 'Do workout' button a window pops up saying "hit lap when warm up complete' (or something to that effect). So I did my little warm up and hit lap...and...nothing. Turns out you have to hit 'start' to start the workout, but I'll take the hit on that one.

Here's the run I did today. Simple out and back, not too long:

I like the fact that you can see your run data displayed against time:


That's my heart rate against time.

You can do the same thing with elevation or pace too:


You may see above where I think things start to fall down a little bit. Look closely at the graphs. You've got heart rate against time, elevation against distance and pace against time. I'm not sure why they've selected it that way. It would make sense to have everything against time...or everything against distance...or even better, make it user selectable.

Second quibble: Look again at those graphs: particularly the elevation one. It goes all the way to sea level. That would have been fine last winter in DC, but here, not so good. There's a lot of wasted space on that graph and you cold see the elevation changes in much more detail if you could adjust the scale...even an auto scale would be more useful than that.

Third quibble: look at the pace against time. How about some data smoothing? That would make things more usable I think.

Last point for today: Garmin connect (the source of all the graphs and pictures from above) is slow. Not the downloading from the watch to the PC. I'm okay with that (and it's wireless). But navigating within the Garmin Connect site is very slow between pages, logging in and pretty much everything.

Things I'd like to see added:
-More user selectable options (as mentioned above)
-The ability to select a point on the geographic display and have the same point highlighted on which ever graph you are looking at.
-The ability to look at more than one piece of data on the same set of axes (i.e. elevation and pace against distance)
-Exportability (as a .gpx file or something similar)

A caveat: it may be possible to do some of the things I've mentioned above. If it is, I can't figure it out (and not for lack of trying). I'm willing to admit error though if someone can show me the light.

Overall, I love the watch. I'm living with Garmin Connect. I feel it's letting the watch down to some degree.