Running Tech

I was feeling pretty smug about my 21Km run on wednesday until I spoke to Neil who told me that he had ran 43 MILES yesterday.

OK, I can live with Neil being a better runner than me, but what is not acceptable is him having cooler gadgets than I have. For years he has had a Garmin GPS watch and this is surely the secret of his success.

Now I’ve evened the playing field with one of my own. A Garmin Forerunner 205.

I have to say that this thing is great. It shows the distance you have run, the pace you are running and the time it is taking you.

It has a lot of fun features too, such as allowing you to load it up with different runs and allowing you to set goals and race against virtual competitors, charting your progress on the screen as you run along.

After a run, I always like to plot the route I took on Google maps and see the distance ran etc, and when Neil first got his, I was a little dissapointed with the software that came with it. I think that to get the most out of a tool like this, you have to have better software to analyse the runs you have done.

Thankfully Garmin have launched Garmin Connect, which is a web application that does just that. I’ll post some more about that software later, but basically it syncs to your watch and then overlays your runs on Google Maps and keeps a full diary of your runs etc. It also allows you to see other people’s runs in the area you are interested in and then you can download these runs to your watch and follow their runs and even compete against them virtually.

It also has a handy embeding feature that allows you to embed the runs you have recently done into your blog or facebook page. Here’s a run I did an hour or so ago…