Friday, May 1, 2009

Back To The Technological Age....

Since the 70.3M World Championships back in November 2008, I have been kinda running blind in terms of pace and distance. My Garmin Forerunner had finally given up the ghost after a hard two years and was resigned to never reset itself ever again. The plan was always to upgrade to a new and improved version but I just never got round to it.

Until back in early March, when in a great alignment of the stars my dad received an offer in his company's monthly magazine....a Garmin Forerunner 405 for much less than MSRP! Sweet, I'll take one of them, with the only downside that I had to wait until this past Wednesday to actually receive it (yep, my parents are back out for a three week stay).

The amusing thing is that my dad is actually retired (but still eligible for company benefits) and there was no online code for "pensioners". After a few calls to Garmin, it was all sorted. I'm not sure that Garmin were counting on pensioners buying a GPS running watch with heart rate features.....my dad does run though, so its not out of the question. (Not sure whether he can control his heart rate when he runs though...tough enough just to run, let alone keep it in the correct zone!)

Anyway I got the watch on Wednesday and after setting it all up, I took it out for its initiation last night. I threw it in at the deep end with a 16 mile jaunt....the watch performed outstandingly well, much better than the person who's wrist it was wrapped around. The hour and fifty minutes that I was out was a struggle. After running on Tuesday and Wednesday the legs weren't juiced and so I kept it to a LSD run....at least I could track the heart rate, pace and distance though.

Average heart rate was 128bpm, pace was 7mins 10secs/mile and final distance was 15.34miles. I have yet to download it to Garmin's software but it looks kinda cool from what I have seen on the web.

Recovery week next week prior to the first triathlon of the year on Saturday May 9th at New Jersey Devilman. Oh yeah, and Bunny Hop Cat 3/4 this Sunday.

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