Essai de montre GPS Garmin

A friend of my wife’s had been insisting on lending me her Garmin 205 watch, just for me to try it and see how great it is. So I had a go yesterday. After a few minutes spent searching and locking the satellites, I went for a well known run of mine, along the river through Wandsworth and  Putney, to Hammersmith and back. I measured this run on a number of web sites such as  Mapmyrun.com, so I knew quite well the distance at several points along the way and could check the distance readings on the Garmin watch.

This was amazingly accurate, but I am guessing that the impression of accuracy is reinforced by the meter precision delivered by the toy. Instantaneous pace reading can move about, up and down, seemingly randomly, but provided an OK view of the pace. Average pace is naturally more accurate and quite useful. I could have used the lap function to check my pace kilometer after kilometer, but did not, as I did not have the manual of instructions and did not want to spend ages fumbling with the thing.

Faced with the perennial problem of estimating the distance actually run, even on more familiar runs, I may decide to buy one of these, possibly the latest model, the 310XT, that is apparently easy to use straight out of the box.

I am still slightly reluctant to acquire a gadget that will be a new source of  numbers and date, with which I will further waste time. However, this is very useful to control your pace when you a steady run or even some repetitions, for instance 1km reps.

In total : 18.8km in 1:31:30, average pace of 4:54