Tech4o Running Watch

What’s the first thing that comes to mind when someone says running watch? For me, I always think “if your watch is running you’d better go catch it,” but that’s just because I’m a comedic genius with a hilarious internal monologue. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that some of you duller folks think of the Garmin Forerunner series when you think of a running watch. Congratulations, your assimilation into the Garmin way of life is now complete, you’ve been brainwashed.

Back in October I had mentioned that I would be reviewing the Tech4o Men’s Accelerator Trail Runner watch and I’m finally getting around to posting my findings. The watch is basically a pedometer and like all pedometers it needs to know the length of your stride to be as accurate as possible. It took a couple of easy laps at the track to determine my length (stride length that is, minds out of the gutter) and I calibrated the watch. The first test was to run a few more easy laps and check the distance; it was pretty exact, reading 0.248 miles after one lap. The next test would be to run some intervals at a faster pace, and unfortunately the watch was not as accurate at the faster pace. Perhaps I’m too fast for my own good. It gave me a single lap reading of 0.20 miles at the faster pace, a miscalculation of almost 20%.

I ran home from the track at an easy pace, and once again the watch easily fell within the 95% accuracy rate that Tech4o claims on their website. Predictably, the watch is very accurate when running at the pace at which you calibrate it, but woefully inaccurate at a faster pace due to the likely change in your stride length. Here’s a few more pros and cons:

Pros
- Size matters (a great deal according to my junk mail folder) and this watch is nice and compact.
- It can be used as your everyday watch.
- There are several advantages in it being a pedometer and not a GPS system:

• It doesn’t take 5 minutes to start up and find a signal.
• It doesn’t ever lose a signal and can thus be used near tall buildings, under trees or even indoors.
• It even works on the treadmill. (Not sure why you’d need to use it on a treadmill, but there you go.)

- It doesn’t need to be charged after each use, although presumable the battery will die at some point and I’ll have to replace it.

Cons
- Not as accurate as a Garmin.
- Doesn’t track nearly as many stats as a Garmin and doesn’t upload to your computer. This will be a major disappointment for those of you who like to geek out over your splits and elevations and heart rate etc.
- It’s not useful at all if you plan to be running at varying paces.
- It doesn’t display pace, instead it displays your speed in mph so some math is required to convert that to a miles/minute pace (or you could just look up a conversion chart online). However, the speed is listed to 2 decimal places (i.e. 6.24mph) so it can still be an accurate indicator of pace.

Conclusion
While I won’t be doing a whole lot of training runs with this watch I will probably use it when I travel so that I don’t have to worry about bringing the charging dock for my Garmin or worse yet, losing my Garmin. If you’re just looking for a simple watch to give you distance and speed (assuming you’re running at a fairly consistent pace) then the Tech4o line of watches might be right for you. At a list price of $69.99 it’s certainly cheaper than a Garmin.

Another Request for Garmin

The fine folks at Garmin have completely ignored my previous request for sunglasses with a Heads-Up-Display (HUD). Why is it that I can get some random guy to offer to make me a frilly skirt, but I can’t get anyone at Garmin to offer to make me those sunglasses I suggested? Perhaps I overshot current technology with the sunglasses request but I have another suggestion for Garmin today that should be fairly easy to accommodate. Being the easily accommodatable guy that I am, I’m willing to forget all about them stonewalling me on the HUD Sunglasses thing if they’re willing to send me a new Forerunner 405 with the following new feature that I am suggesting today:

Predicted Finish Time. I call it PFT for short, which is pronounced kind of like a quick, quiet fart (pffftt). I think that makes it an onomatopoeia. You would primarily use the PFT feature for races. You would need to input your race distance prior to beginning your workout or race. The Garmin would take the distance you have remaining and multiply it by your current pace, then it would add this to the time that you’ve already been running. The Garmin would essentially tell you what your finish time is going to be based on you maintaining your current pace. Now that’s useful information! Much more useful than some of the existing features that my Garmin has, I mean, have any of you ever used the Sunrise or Sunset feature? How about the distance feature? Totally pointless, am I right?

As always, if anyone at Garmin sees my PFT idea and implements it, or even if they implement PFT without seeing this, they are welcome to pay me royalties for my geniusness. While we’re on the subject of great ideas, I just thought of another one that should be standard on every Garmin, a thermostat. No, I don’t mean a thermometer. I don’t want it to tell me how hot it is, I want to be able to turn the temperature down. Now admittedly I’m not sure how the technology behind a thermostat works, but people have had them in their homes for like, the last 2,000 years or something, so it’s about time we figured out how to make them fit into watches (and sunglasses). Also, how about an incline/decline button like my treadmill has? You want to do hill sprints but don’t have a hill? Just use the Garmin incline button. Tired of running uphill? Use the decline button and you’ll be running an easy 0% grade in no time. There are tons of great things that Garmin could put on their Forerunner series watches, yours in the comments.

Agony

[by Candis]

It hurts, it actually hurts. I don’t think I can do this. I have had to do horrible, unimaginable things for 5 whole days now. I don’t want to hear I told you so. I had to... I had to... I had to write my training sessions down on a piece of paper! That aggravation which is Windows Vista has struck again and for two weeks they expect me to be without my computer!

Did you know that runners used to just keep spirals full of pages and pages of their runs. No auto-generated calendars. No motivating graphs. No Google maps. If I want to remember how I did, I have to page back through my high schoolesque trapper keeper and remember.

I have this fantastic running toy that tracks my pace, elevation, and distance but I can’t download it anywhere! Ever heard a Garmin cry? They are made to analyze. Made to tell me every little detail about my run. They comfort, “Oh honey, it was a slow run because it was 93 degrees out.” “Really, who can be expected to run intervals in the wind.” Your Garmin will even stroke your ego, “Wow, you are getting so fast, look at that hill you obliterated!” even “Don’t worry, you own that race!” Now I just stare into it’s gray, listless eyes and it tells me how unfulfilled it is. “Don’t worry, we’ll fight through it. Let’s run anyway.”

For those of you who are wondering how I posted this without a computer... First of all, I’ll thank you all to just mind your own business. And second of all... telegram STOP

It DOES Tell the Freakin’ Time

I don’t know about you guys, but I’m sick of having to straighten people out who think the Garmin Forerunner 205 doesn’t tell time. It does. I own 2 of them, I should know. At the start of the Bolder Boulder 10K we overheard someone ask the lady next to us for the time. She pointed to her Forerunner 205 and said “Oh this doesn’t tell time, it does all kinds of other wonderful things but would you believe it doesn’t tell the time?”

I wanted to grab her by the collar and yell “You stupid, stupid, ignorant, vapid harpy,” punctuating each word with a stinging backhand. But I didn’t. Because I’m a nice guy, and also because it occurred to me that maybe she just didn’t want to tell the stranger what the time was. Who among us hasn’t feigned a broken watch to avoid sharing the time with strangers?

Anyway, this wasn’t the first time that I’d heard someone say that the Garmin Forerunner 205 doesn’t tell the time, and I just wanted to set the record straight. I’m really not sure why it bothers me so much (or why I seem to have violent tendencies before a race), but it does. I suppose that some of the confusion comes from Garmin themselves, take a look at this comparison table of the 205, 305 and 405. At the bottom of the page under the Sport Watch category it says “yes” under the 405 and “no” under the other two. I can only assume that this is because the earlier models have a 10 hour battery life which makes using them strictly as a watch more cumbersome than the Zack Morris cell phone. The 405 on the other hand, has a power save mode that allows you to use only the watch feature, at least I think that’s how it works. I won’t know for sure until someone from Garmin steps up and sends me a free one in exchange for a review. Seriously, how many hints do I have to drop? I’ve already got a glowing review written up and ready to go all I need is the watch, is anybody listening to me?

For those of you who are reading this and sheepishly wanting to ask how to get your Garmin to display the time but are worried that you’ll have to endure our collective scorn, allow me to save you the trouble. From the main menu: Settings – General – Data Fields – Main 1, enter the number of data fields you wish to display and then you will be presented with a menu of options. One of those options is Time of Day, and here’s where it’s going to get complicated. Selecting the “Time of Day” option will display... wait for it... the Time of Day! Hey presto! All of a sudden your friends will think you’re a gadgetical wizard when you impress them by telling them what time it is!

2 Garmins?

You might have noticed from the race pictures that Candis posted yesterday (without my express written permission I might add) that we were both wearing a Garmin during our recent 10K. It’s true, we’re a 2 Garmin family. Why do we need 2 Garmins? Why can’t we just share one?

We’ve become Garmin-dependent. I can no longer run without my Garmin, how would I know how fast I was going or how far I’d gone? It’s true what they say, “once you go Garmin you never go back.” That is what they say, right? I guess you could argue that the only time that we need 2 Garmins is when we both enter the same race, but the thought of having to run a race without my Garmin is a terrifying nightmare, one that I don’t care to dwell on at length. Plus, what if I like to have my screens set up to view different information than Candis does? What if the battery was dead in one of them when I wanted to go for a run? You don’t seriously expect me to just use a stopwatch do you? What is this, the stone age?

But I confess, the reason for our double Garmin awesomeness goes beyond practical application. It’s also a status symbol. We like to think of ourselves as being like those extravagant families in the 50s who owned 2 TVs. Sure, at the time everyone thought they were spendthrifts, splashing their money around like an out of control fire hose, but it wasn’t long before everyone followed suit.

We like to stand at the start of races both fiddling with our Garmins and talking loudly about what settings we’re going to use so that everyone knows that we’re a 2 Garmin family. The next time I run a race without Candis, I’m going to wear both Garmins on one arm, mostly so that everyone can marvel at me, but also as a backup in case one fails. Also this will allow me to look at 8 different readouts at once. I’ll have no time left for watching the path I’m running on so please try to stay out of my way. The guy with 2 Garmins is coming through!

Let’s be honest, you probably didn’t notice from the pictures that we were both wearing Garmins, and that’s why I felt the need to point it out to you today. How else would you know how cool we are? It’s not like I’m ever going to have an excuse to post pictures of my Country Club Membership, my personal humidor, or my finely tailored suits that I lovingly tuck into my Louis Vuitton garment bag when I’m flying in spacious First Class.

Trackless Intervals

My first FIRST speedwork session was yesterday and I was going to publish this post about it until I found out that yesterday was also National Grammar Day which made me too scared to type. I, never was, very good with’ my comma’s or’ apos’trophies and I dont know what it mean’s to dangle your participle but Im pretty, sure that I do it. I don’t even know if it’s a good thing or bad thing to dangle your participles but it sounds like it would be fun... you know... as long as you weren’t running, you don’t want your participles dangling when you run. Am I right or am I right?

Moving on. I woke up at a previously undiscovered hour of the morning and programmed my Garmin to run 8 x 400m intervals with 400m rest periods. This was only the second or third time that I’ve used Gustavo (my Garmin) in such a manner, and I have to say that it’s a pretty cool feature. Maybe the rest of you use this feature regularly, maybe you read the manual and fully understand all of the Garmin’s features but I prefer to discover cool new things as I go. It’s more fun that way.

I decided to put together a list detailing the pros and cons of running your intervals without the benefit of a track. Here they are in RazZDoodle-approved bullet points:

Pros

• I was not running in circles.
• It was dark and the track is not lit.
• Non-repetitive scenery.
• I didn’t have to climb over the chain link fence to get into the locked high school track which usually results in me getting my shorts (or my dangling participles) caught on the fence.
• Freedom to run wherever I want.
• Some of the intervals occurred on nice downhill stretches.
• It was kind of fun.

Cons

• It’s still running.
• Some of my intervals were uphill and into the wind. :(
• It didn’t really feel like interval training. (Although this might also be considered a “Pro”)
• Pavement/asphalt is not as soft as track.
• No bleachers to sprint past and imagine myself winning the gold medal.

A Request for Garmin

Whenever a gift giving occasion comes along, multitudes of husbands go and ask their wives what they should buy for them, but not me. Oh no. I used to do that until I learned my lesson. Now when one of those times comes around where I’m supposed to buy my wife a gift, like Valentine’s Day, or her birthday, or Tuesday, I already know what I’m going to get her. How? I pay attention. This earth-shattering departure from societal norms is one of the things that makes me a freakin’ awesome husband, but before you go heaping praise on me, let me explain how this radical new way came to be. (Ladies, take notes.)

Every time I asked my wife what gift she wanted, she’d come up with something that would be perfect for her. “Oooooh,” she’d say, “I really want a large capacity washing machine that becomes a dryer when the wash cycle is over and then dries the clothes in a wrinkle free manor.”
“That sounds really cool,” I’d answer, “where did you see it?”
That’s when the other shoe would drop. “Oh, I’ve never actually seen one anywhere. I just conjured it up in my head so that you’d be miserable as you wandered from store to store asking pimple-faced clerks where the washer-dryers were located only to find that they had misunderstood the question...” OK that’s not what she said, but that’s what I heard.

Naturally, I don’t ask my wife for ideas anymore. It’s much easier to painstakingly pay attention to her when she talks and then go buy her the things she desires that I know actually exist. Unfortunately this strategy doesn’t stop her from occasionally telling me about made up stuff that she really, really wants.

Such was the case this past week, when she told me that she wanted a Garmin of her own. Oh, but not just any Garmin. No, no. She wanted a Garmin that was a pair of sunglasses instead of a watch, and not cheap, crappy sunglasses either. Stylish ones. Then instead of going through the agony of having to look down to see your pace, the sunglasses would just flash that information up on the inside of the lenses, kind of like a Heads-Up-Display (HUD). And hey! Let’s not stop there, the sunglasses should also play MP3s and you should have the option to hear your pace, distance, time etc. through the earpieces.

It’s a fantastic idea, but I don’t think they actually exist. So if someone at Garmin is reading this post, then I’d like to suggest the Garmin Sunrunner 505 Sunglasses (pictured above, artist’s impression). If someone over there could get on this idea pronto, I know my wife would appreciate it. Would it be asking too much to have a pair of the 505s over-nighted to my office so that I could give them to my wife for Valentine’s Day?

NOTE: If no one at Garmin has thought of this yet, then they are welcome pay me royalties for this idea.

A "Serious" Review of the Garmin Forerunner

Among the comments from yesterday’s post were several that I am resisting the urge to focus on. However there was one comment that caught my attention. Amanda, who eats hills for breakfast, asked “but seriously I want to know what you think of [the Garmin]?” Amanda, I am offended by your use of the word seriously. We do not do ANYTHING seriously here at Half-Fast, you should know better. What I can offer you are my real opinions of the Garmin couched in juvenile humor and sarcasm. It’s what I do best.

Last night I strapped on my Garmin Forerunner 205 and headed out for a 5 mile run. What I liked the most about the Garmin is that it let’s other runners know that I’m a serious runner. When I passed people on the trail our eyes would lock for a fleeting second and I could tell that they were thinking “not only is that the prettiest man I’ve ever seen, but he is also clearly a serious runner.” I like the Garmin because it is a status symbol, just like the Starbucks coffee that I take into the office everyday. My Starbucks let’s everyone know that I’m too good for the break room coffee and I’m wealthy enough to do something about it, i.e. pay $5.48 for a grande, non-fat, no-whip, half-caf, extra hot, vanilla latte.

Some of the other features that I liked:

• Auto Pause. Whenever I stopped at a crosswalk the Garmin automatically stopped the timer. It took about 3 - 4 seconds to pause and only 1 - 2 seconds to restart so technically it was stealing a few seconds from me at every stop, but it’s a cool feature nonetheless.
• Auto Lap. I set the Garmin to begin a new lap every mile allowing me to analyze my mile splits at the end of the workout.
• Distance Alerts. It can be set to beep at you every mile (or whatever distance you select).
• Digital Training Partner. I didn’t use this feature but I will, and I’m pretty sure I’ll love it, unless my digital training partner keeps beating me.
• Accuracy. I ran a route that I’ve mapped out many times on various pedometers as well as on Gmaps Pedometer and the Garmin appears to be very accurate.
• Pace. I’ve read complaints elsewhere about the pace being erratic, but it seemed to be pretty much dead on right from the start. Of course I’m in Colorado so I’m a mile closer to the satellites than all of you flatlanders.

Some of the things I disliked:

• I disliked that it made me do stupid things, like running with my wrist near the ground and then leaping into the air and throwing my hand up high just to see if I could get it to register a 9 foot spike in elevation. (Didn’t work by the way.)
• I disliked that it does not have a backlight to illuminate the display which led to me only looking at the Garmin when I ran under a street light. Of course when I got home I discovered that the Garmin DOES have a backlight which is very easy to use, I’m an idiot.
  All in all, there was nothing that I disliked.

I love my new Garmin and I’ve only run with it once. Maybe I’ll post a more complete review after I get more familiar with it, but until then I need everyone’s help with something. My digital training partner needs a name. He needs an identity so that I can motivate myself to beat him and talk trash to him as I run. My wife suggested I call him Chocolate, since I’m Vanilla and that would be opposite. You can’t see it but I’m rolling my eyes and groaning as I type this. My idea (Chump) wasn’t any better. Please tell me that you are all more creative than we are. Your suggestions in the comments.

My New Garmin Forerunner

I’ve never been so excited to try out a new toy in my entire life. I took my Garmin Forerunner 205 out of the box and read the entire manual on Tuesday night and on Wednesday night I was ready to go put it to the test.

The first thing I noticed was how freakin’ huge it was. Look how big it is on my manly wrist? (picture right) I would put it around my ankle but then I’d just look like someone under house arrest or Lindsay Lohan when she had that ankle monitor, and if I looked like Lohan I’d have to spend even more time in front of the mirror, naked.

So I strapped it on and started my run. I decided beforehand that I wasn’t going to keep looking at because a) that’s how faceplants are born and b) I didn’t want to be distracted from my run. After a few minutes though, my curiosity got the best of me and I looked at it to see how it was doing. Nothing. I was disappointed to find it staring blankly back at me. The timer was running but there was no distance displayed, no pace, nothing. I kept running until I had gone a mile, hoping that it would start to pick something up. No luck. It was not registering that I had gone any distance at all.

At that point I was so disappointed and mad that I just got off the treadmill and put it back in the box!

I’ll give it one more chance tomorrow when I run outside and if it still doesn’t work I’ll be shipping it back with a strongly worded letter!

A New Toy, Almost

After work on Tuesday night I went out with my family to purchase a Garmin Forerunner because quite frankly, I deserve one. I have been contemplating buying one for some time now and I received a gift card to Road Runner Sports for my birthday so I planned on using that to pay for the new toy.

There are very few things in this universe that I don’t understand, but among them are the following: Why Monday Night Football hates my eardrums (see commentators Tony Kornheiser, Joe Theismann, Dennis Miller, etc.) Why people are paying upwards of $2,000 for tickets to see Hannah Montana. Why anyone feels that it’s OK to converse with me while we stand exposed at the urinals. And finally, why my kids lose all perspective of what constitutes socially acceptable behavior the instant we enter any sporting goods store. It figures that the one store that I don’t mind going shopping in is the one store where my kids become devil-children, or los niños del Diablo for those of you south of the border.

Tuesday night was no different. The over-eager sales associate came over to offer us assistance and while I was explaining what I was looking for, my oldest son was tugging on my hand demanding I remove his coat. The sales associate, whose name was Tom, glanced nervously at my kids and then back at me as if to say ‘I really don’t like kids very much.’ I hate it when people act like this when I’m with my kids. ‘Hey Tom, guess what? I don’t like them very much either but at least I possess the decorum to not show it in front of them!’

Tom quickly shows me to the Garmins and then leaves just as quickly. In what would turn out to be a horrendous mistake I remove the 4-year-old’s jacket which leads to me also removing the 2-year-old’s jacket, and I turn my attention to the Garmins. Not thirty seconds later a fight breaks out in women’s apparel in which jackets are being used like nunchucks. My wife and I separate the pair and she ties their jackets around their waists after declining my more radical idea of tying them around their necks.

I go back to looking at Garmins, debating if I want the one with the heart rate monitor or the cheaper one without the heart rate monitor. Cheaper wins out and I try it on to see how it feels. Somewhere on the other side of the store a jacket takes flight. I'm guessing by the size of it that it wasn't the sales associate’s jacket and I can tell from the trajectory that it was launched from somewhere around 2 feet above ground level.

My wife and I decide to divide and conquer. I take the youngest boy to one side of the store and she takes the oldest to the other side. This is a great strategy if you can put up with the downside: Going out with your wife and not ever seeing her because you’re afraid of the consequences of uniting the Gatekeeper and the Keymaster. This is also why I won’t be having any more children. We currently have two, which means that we can still play man to man defense against them. When the third child arrives you have to switch to zone defense and it’s just not as effective.

Having settled things down, and after re-hanging countless shirts, shorts and socks back on the rack I headed to the cash register with my new Garmin. Well worth the hassle we’d endured. Unfortunately the gift card didn’t work, and Tom would have to... blah, blah, blah, -long list of excuses that don’t make any sense to me-... and long story short, I’ll have to order it online. This means that our pilgrimage to the running store was completely futile other than to raise my blood pressure a few degrees and cause me to sound like my father. “Don’t touch that!” “Put that back!” “Stop playing with that!” “No yelling!” “No running!”