edpaffjr.comMy parents bought us a Garmin Forerunner 305 for Christmas this year. I haven’t had too many opportunities to start using it yet, but I did finally get the heart rate monitor working for a run this afternoon. The temperature was peaking in the upper 50’s so I headed outside for a nice four mile loop. Once I made it back to my desk, I downloaded the data to my computer. Below is a nice chart that graphs my speed and heart rate versus the grade percentage.
You can easily see how the heart rate line (red) quickly climbs toward 150 bpm and then hovers around the 170 bpm range between miles one through four. You can also see how my speed (blue) started off quick, averaging 7 mph for the first mile and half, and then falling down closer to 6 mph for the rest of the run. I stopped running after 4 miles since I was really feeling it and I was facing a rather large hill. This route appears to have much more elevation changes toward the end (yellow) so maybe it would be better to run it in reverse. I may try doing that as I hope to keep running at lunch a couple of times a week. And I really look forward to seeing what else the Forerunner can do and hopefully watch my times go down and my speeds go up.
Garmin connect is awesome. I wish it was a bit more social and allowed setting up challenges and goals.
Good call. I was just using the Garmin Training Center, but the Garmin Connect is much cooler. I see that there is a Goals feature, but I haven’t looked into it much. Thanks for the heads up.