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.

More Running in the News

Strange how things come in groups.

The other night, the LW and I were talking about Top Gear and their impending world tour and British actress Kristin Scott Thomas came up. The very next day at work I was reading a news article from a Canadian news site and WHAM! Kristin Scott Thomas' picture in the margin linking to an article in the entertainment section. If you want a third, we watched Four Weddings and a Funeral last night, but that's probably related to the first two.

Then, after my last post about running and science, I find this article in the New Yorker.

Interesting discussion of the development of running in the U.S. from both a competitive and recreational standpoint. Also some interesting comments on the demographics of recreational runners. Did you know the readership of Runner's World has the same average income as that of Forbes? Or, how about how we poor-fair-mediocre recreational runners subsidize the elite (our shoe and clothing purchases and race entry fees pay their appearance fees and sponsorships with the major companies). Intuitively obvious, I'd just never thought of it that way before.

Will there be a third?

Running in the News

Thanks to the LW for sending this to me. From ABC news of all places.

The thesis:

...[T]he human body took the ideal shape of a long-distance runner starting some 2 million years ago, the researchers say. The long, lean build helped us scavenge widely scattered kills and could also have been an advantage when hunting down prey over long distances.

Of course, one question not asked or answered in the article is "Who sponsored the research?" As usual, the LW cuts to the chase and asks the important questions. (She should know, she used to sponsor all sorts of research.)

Food for thought if nothing else.

Whoops (update 4)

Really nice run today at lunch. Not even 3 mile, but it was on uneven ground and it was pretty fast (considering how little speed work I've done since my abortive injury fest on the track).

Ankle is still not 100%, but it's getting better!

Translations

This, I believe, is why they send FAOs to language school. (Warning, LW snorted her wine with this one.)