I have come to realize that the Garmin 305 is definitely designed to be worn while running or biking only. The first clue is that despite it’s light weight it is the size of 3 normal watches. It is quite literally huge. The second and somewhat less obvious clue is that no matter what you do to reconfigure the display… it never actually shows you the current time. It knows the time. Down to the GPS inspired second. It won’t tell you though unless you go into the configuration menu and look at the super tiny display down at the bottom. That doesn’t matter though.

Here’s why: My run over near that high school from Friday uploaded to MotionBased

There are so many cool things about this, it’s hard to list them all. Take for example this chart on the right. This is an analysis of the amount of time I spent on flat ground, in a descent or ascending. I think most important though is the heart rate monitoring. My main goal throughout the training is to work within a certain heart rate. That’s one of the big reasons I splurged on the watch. As you can see from the graphs on MotionBased I did a fairly good job of keeping my heart rate within zone 3 (70-80% of maximum) throughout the entire run.

Now then… here’s the really weird thing. Mom called a couple nights ago and told me how the route she had been running was actually longer than she had thought. Oh? How did she know? Why, she had bought this watch which tracks your GPS position and all that. Oh? Which one? It’s called Garmin ForeRunner 305.

Yea… we didn’t know it but we both went out and bought the exact same watch. It’s not surprising really. There aren’t that many out there to pick from and if you want the accuracy of GPS then the Garmin is pretty much your only realistic choice.

Oddly enough though she was only using the watch. I pointed her at my MotionBased upload and she now has an account too. I told her how to use the heart monitor and I hope she uses it on her next run.