Radda Run. This was my first outing with the Garmin 305, which arrived yesterday (purchased through the Fast Running Blog Store). Yes, I finally had enough of the Suunto t6 and have jumped onto the GPS bandwagon. (I feel a little guilty getting a new one when Clyde just destroyed his, but what can you do?) I spent a little bit of time last night sorting through the features, which I was pretty impressed with. It is much more oriented toward running performance than the Suunto. The Suunto's strength is in the training effect analysis, but on a daily basis what matters more to me is accurate pace and distance information. I found that the Suunto's foot pod system was unreliable over time. I like the size of the display on the Garmin, so I can see lots of data at once. I found that the pace information does not necessarily adjust in real time (unlike the Suunto), which is probably a function of waiting for satellite info, but on the other hand maybe I just wasn't speeding up as quickly as I thought. I had the AutoLap set for 1 mile splits, and after 4 easy miles with the group, I did a two mile tempo run on Wander Lane. I started the run a little after the beep went off and I went through the hillier first mile in 6:07. The second mile has some rollers too, but it was 5:58. I felt like the effort was right even if the times were a little slow. I blew timing the tempo on this last week and reported faster splits, but I don't think they were faster. The GPS doesn't lie, which is why I got it. I'm ready to add another tempo mile to this workout, the only problem is that the half mile preceding my start point is pretty steep, not a great place to take off from, and the roads at the end aren't much better. I'll have to figure that out.
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