Stoat

I have a funky new watch, a Garmin Forerunner 110. It lets me do kewl stuff like:

although you only get that after post-processing, of course. In fact I haven't even worked out how to make it work like a GPS when running, i.e. display lat/long or grid refs. Nor have I worked out how to persuade the stupid post-processing software to give me mph instead of mins/mile like all the hard-core runners want, pah. But the upload-from-watch (via the provided nipple clamp) to-web-and-graph is impressively smooth and painless.

You're fascinated - I know - so let me tell you that we did two laps: the first, slow, included the lake. The second was faster. And then at the red line I ran a bit faster back to the mothership. The heartrate peak of ~180 is when I sprinted up the A14 bridge.

[Update: give me mph instead of mins/mile - well, it has now swapped to mph, which is good, but I don't know why, which is less good -W]

[Update: twice now the watch has frozen / locked up on me, both times when attaching it to the computer: I think it happens when you don't get the clamp on quite correctly and it briefly connects / disconnects. If that happens, you have to reset it by pressing the "light" button for ~7 secs. But you lose all your data. Others have the same problem. Possibly press and hold Lap/Reset and the Light buttons simultaneously may be a better way of resetting.

Update on that: the problem mostly occurs if you *haven't* "reset" the activity before trying to upload - somehow it can't cope. So always remember to do that first.]

[Update: I've realised something about the tracking / recording, prompted by DHW: that although the max sample rate appears to be every-5-sec (and this isn't configurable), it will drop samples that are "uninteresting" if it wants to. In particular, if you are erging, so the position is constant, it will quite likely not record many heart rate samples. The only solution I've found it to keep the watch on your wrist to generate movement and hence more logging.

Another whinge while I'm here: there is no "turn the light on and keep it on" mode, which would be useful for night time outings.]