Friday, March 20, 2009

Examining the Garmin Forerunner

By Christopher Loch

There are several outdoor sports and activities where a GPS unit could be very useful, helping you to stay on course when cycling or aiding you in locating your destination when cross-country skiing. Unfortunately, many GPS devices just seem to get in the way when you try to use them in conjunction with outdoor sports... you usually have to stop what you're doing in order to get a reading, ruining your pace.

This is where the Garmin Forerunner comes in... these useful GPS devices are wrist-mounted so that they aren't going to get in your way, and feature a number of additional features to help you get the most out of your outdoor sporting experience. By making use of a Garmin Forerunner you'll find that your workouts and sporting activities become a lot more rewarding.

One of the ways that the Garmin Forerunner can help you to get more out of the time that you spend outdoors is by giving you accurate location data when on a run, hiking, or taking part in some other outdoor sport. The Forerunner isn't just going to give you some generic GPS data, however; you will also be able to set a course, specify specific points of interest, and can even use your Forerunner to get directions back to your starting point. Though these are useful features for a wrist-mounted GPS device, you'll find that the Garmin Forerunner can do much more.

There are a number of other features packed in to every Garmin Forerunner as well. You can receive accurate data in regards to your speed, the current time, how far you've travelled since leaving your starting point, and even the pace at which you've been travelling. Depending on the specific Forerunner model that you choose you can even get data on your heart rate so that you'll know exactly how difficult your workout has been.

Best of all, the data that's collected by your Garmin Forerunner can be downloaded onto your PC for use with the training software supplied with the unit or uploaded to websites such as MotionBased.com so that you can save preferred routes and see exactly how well you've been doing while training. This will help you to not only determine those portions of your training workouts that could use some work, but will also give you an idea of which portions of your workout you are gaining the most benefit from so that you can try to expand that benefit even further. As weeks go by you can even compare different results to monitor your progress and get the most out of future workouts.

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