My Garmin Debacle
So I was running the Simsbury River Race a few weeks ago and prior to the race I was sitting in Kim’s car with her discussing my race strategy. She asked me what my current running pace was. I pulled out my phone and starting to look at my stats and she told me, “Girl, you need to get a Garmin! It’s time to get away from all that phone crap.” (Well maybe not word for word, but that’s what she was trying to say). So I decided to use the birthday money my mom gave me towards a Garmin watch.
As soon as the race was over, I came home and pulled up the Garmin site and amazon.com and did some research. There were two specific things that I had to consider when purchasing a watch, battery life and interval training.
Well, I should have done more research because the first watch I ordered, The Garmin Forerunner 210 could only do interval training in increments of 10 seconds. It’s a nice watch, but I wasn’t really sure if it was going to suit my training needs.
So I ordered another Garmin, the Forerunner 310XT and when it arrive it was the size of a laptop on my arm! I wasn’t too happy about the size of that watch, but it had a lot of features I was interested in like the lap pace and other data on the larger screen while doing the interval training. So I figured worst case, I can wear it on my fitness belt and look at the data as I am running.
The other mistake I made was testing out the watch very little prior to my marathon. I had an epic fail on race morning because I charged the Garmin Forerunner 310, but didn’t put it in power save mode overnight. So when Gail and I got to the lobby on race morning it was dead! So we ran upstairs, she grabbed her watch, I grabbed my Forerunner 210 and we went back downstairs. I used it during the race with the 20/20 intervals, but when we hit 99 reps of intervals it stopped and I didn’t know what to do! I thought I lost all of my data. Come to find out, the data is still in the watch, but I have no idea how to restart the intervals. I did restart the timer but I assumed I was starting at mile 0 again and starting all new stats. We used Gail’s watch at this point in the race, but I was trying to capture as much data as I could because I like to review the numbers after my races.
My most recent purchase is the Garmin Forerunner 220 and so far I love it so much that I wore it as my every day watch.
It is simple to use, the battery life is great and I like the screen and information it provides me during my run. I like that I can select intervals for my own specific times for run and rest, and I came across a walk/run timer built into it today. I am still learning the watch, but it is very easy to use and some time on YouTube will really teach me a lot about it.
The watch is very light weight and is comfortable on my arm. When I first started running with a watch I hated the feeling on my arm. It really irritated me. Ironically, when I was running the Providence marathon with it on, it didn’t even bother me. I charged it when I received it last week and used it twice for running, and as a watch for time and it hasn’t required a charge yet.
The Garmin 220 is a keeper for sure. I already returned the other two watches and have no regrets. The Garmin Forerunner 210 is a nice watch, but when comparing the 210 to the 220 I’m all about the 220. Easy to read screen, cute colors and very light weight.