Say hello to my little friend

My goal of running 8.5 - 9 miles on Monday morning hit a snag this week.  I woke up Sunday morning with a stomach bug and spent the entire day in bed.  I felt a bit better on Monday morning (well enough to go to work) but I didn't even attempt a run.  I ended up running just over 3 miles on Tuesday morning and again on Wednesday morning but couldn't go any further because I still wasn't feeling great.  I took today off and hope to get in at least 6 miles tomorrow morning.  The reason I pushed through the pain Tuesday morning is because I was excited to try out my new friend: the Garmin Forerunner 310XT GPS watch!

I left it at home this morning so I don't have a picture with it on my wrist (so you can see how big it is) but I'll try to add one next week.  Let me just say that I love this watch already.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to be wearing it out on the town but it's not too ugly.  I love being able to see my average pace for the current lap.  Right now the lap length is set to 1 mile but I can change it to as low as 0.25 miles if I want.  One of the reasons I bought this watch is so I can see my current pace in order to try to sustain a constant pace throughout my long run.  Usually when I run I have no idea how fast, or slow, I'm going and sometimes start out too fast and then wear down later in the run.  Now I can monitor and adjust my pace as needed and it's much easier than trying to power on my phone, unlock it, and try to read the pace on the running app as my arm is swinging back and forth.

I have also found it to be more accurate.  I ran a 3.1 miles Tuesday morning with my 310XT along with my phone running the Map My Run app, and here were the results:

Time: 26:32 (Garmin) 26:32 (MMR)
Distance: 3.11 miles (Garmin) 3.16 miles (MMR)
Avg. Pace: 8:33 min/mile (Garmin) 8:23 (MMR)

When I mapped out my course on the USATF Map It website my route came to 3.11 miles; the same as reported by the Garmin.  I wanted to see why the Map My Run app showed me running an extra .05 miles so I opened up the maps on the Map My Run website as well as the Garmin Connect website.  These pictures (from one of the turns) show the difference:

Garmin Forerunner 310XT

Map My Run app

As you can see the Map My Run app really has me swinging out wide on the turns (which I was not doing) while the 310XT has it much closer to the route I actually followed.  Granted, this is not a huge difference but I like that the watch matched up exactly with the calculations on the USATF website.  I also like that the Garmin beeps/vibrates every lap (mile in my case) so I know I've reached a mile without having to look at my watch.  Of course I looked at my watch 56 times before that so I know I was at 2.98 miles 5 seconds before but it's still nice.

Now I no longer have to run with my phone and can use a smaller, lighter MP3 player like one of my iPods.  Oh, the watch also came with a heart rate monitor which I haven't tried using yet.  There are a lot more bells and whistles on the watch that I probably won't use or don't know about yet but I really like it so far.  Here's hoping for nice weather, and a non-queasy stomach for my run tomorrow morning.

Have a great Thursday!