I recently gave in and bought my first running GPS watch. I agonized over the expenditure a little bit once I hit “process order” on Amazon, but that guilt/apprehension completely disappeared after using it for the first time yesterday! I jumped right in and went with the Garmin Forerunner 220. Lucky for me that purple is my favorite color, because that’s the only women’s option.
It even has a purple theme option for the screens!
I have been using RunKeeper for the past year, and while that is definitely a solid app, this watch and the accompanying Garmin Connect website and app are just in a whole other league. The watch syncs with Bluetooth to your phone, where you can download the app and not only upload all of your activities, but get access to a bunch of extra data for your runs that isn’t available/viewable on the watch itself. You can also set goals, create training plans to send to the watch, share with friends (if you’re into that, I’m not), save routes as courses to be repeated and times compared, and on and on. Specific to your runs, you will have access to more data about your run than you ever dreamed possible.
Routes, maps, elevation profiles, split info (pace and speed), cadence, calories, best pace, average pace, run profile replay, etc. all laid out in a really nice dashboard and with charts. You can also send all the data to a spreadsheet, view your stats in a calendar format (how far did I run this week/month/year???), create reports….okay, I know I’m getting a little excited here, but perhaps a little bit of context will help. I love data. I perform data analysis for a living and get to play with huge sets of data all day. Sure, it’s a corporate job and has all the attendant drawbacks, but overall, the job itself is pretty cool because I get paid to analyze large sets of data, which I love 🙂 So, you can imagine that getting to experience this in relation to my running now is very exciting for this data nerd!
I love a good data dashboard!
I’m experimenting more with trail running (as evidenced by some of my splits above, sheesh!) and I’m really falling in love with it. I am not a fast runner, so while I still really enjoy road running/racing, I think I’m going to include a lot more trail racing in my repertoire. It suits me – slow and steady. Also something about having to focus on every single footstep helps me reach that zen mode a lot quicker than running on smooth surfaces where you don’t have to worry about falling so much.
I have a trail half marathon on November 8th, and yesterday’s run was exploring that course, which I really loved and am now even more excited for that race! Before that though, I have a 15K race in one week! Yes, one week! My leg has been giving me some issues that I just have to keep an eye on, but overall, I’m excited to race next weekend. I won’t be breaking any personal records since I’m still dealing with this injury and honestly just haven’t trained as much as I would have liked to, but it will be a fun day. It’s a big national race, so it will be an experience.
The other new thing I tried recently is another app I highly recommend for anyone who loves to run with music and is very motivated by the music itself. I read about an app called RockMyRun in Competitor magazine recently and I decided to give it a try. Boy does it knock the socks off of Pandora! It’s playlists/mixes created by DJs specifically for running. You specify the genre(s), BPM, length, and whether you want PG or R-rated lyrics and it gives you a list of playlists! When you pay the $36 annual subscription to get a premium membership (highly, highly recommended), you get access to all mixes, access to mixes over one hour (I think 45-60 minutes is the max on the free version), no ads, you can adjust the BPM on mixes, download/cache mixes for playing at times without a signal, etc. The mixes are so motivating! It’s better than just a playlist and is now an essential tool for my runs. It’s one of my favorite apps of all time now.
What’s new with running for you these days?
Have you recently tried/found something that reinvigorated your workouts or runs?
Sidebar – there is a chocolate peanut butter flavor of GU energy gels, I’m getting down on some of that in next weekend’s race!
🙂
Becky
Lace Up And Live Life 