GPS for Running
Back when I lived in Alpharetta I drove a couple miles to reach the Greenway whenever I wanted to bike or run. It was a luxury that I never fully appreciated until I moved away, spring arrived and running was no longer quite so simple. There's something about being able to run on a trail that's dedicated to such activity. No cars. No intersections. One-tenth mile markers. The Atlanta Beltline may one day be great, but it has a long ways to go.
To garner some inspiration and accurately measure progress without benefit of those mile markers, I picked up a Garmin Forerunner 610. It wasn't cheap and the reviews (both Amazon and REI) were quite mixed. The reviews that scared me the most had to do with build quality - buttons falling off, the wrist strap breaking. Thankfully, my local REI had it in stock and they offered it at the same price as Amazon. Build quality is no longer an issue since I can drop it off and pick up a new one each time it falls apart, although I'd prefer if it just held together.
The watch (I can't think of a similarly short word to describe it without repeating its name every time) comes with a USB ANT+ device that I leave connected to my computer. Each time I finish a run, I need only set the watch down near my computer and it magically syncs and uploads my data to the Garmin Connect site. This Garmin software isn't terrible. It's not great. At all. But it's not terrible. And considering that we're talking about Garmin, that's a pretty big step for them. In years past it was evident that Garmin knew about as much about Desktop software as I knew about embedded software (not much).
This Garmin Connect website on the other hand is a different story. They did a truly fine job with it. The graphs, management and sharing options are all easy to use and pretty handy. It was evident from all of these fine graphs that I haven't run in a long time. But, hey, that's exactly what I was looking for: motivation. And graphs and charts strongly appeal to my Type-A personality. Hurray for data.