new toy

Today I took delivery of my latest toy, a Garmin Forerunner 305 wrist mount GPS and heart rate monitor. Initial results look very promising. I took it for a run at lunch and my ride back home from work. Plotting my route on a map it seems pretty close to true, putting me right on the roads and paths I had traveled. Even the elevation plot looks OK. Uploading data to Garmin's MotionBased website is easy, and once there I get, along with a load of graphs, a report of the weather at the time of the workout. Easy to implement, but neat and kinda geekily cool.

To add to the fun I downloaded a bit of freeware that will marry up my GPS data with my digital pics. I should be able to plot them straight onto my flickr map. Untested, but it should work...watch this space. Well, watch Flickr actually. Sal has expressed an interest in walking from Spit Bridge to Manly on Saturday morning - a perfect opportunity to take some pics and track our wander.

Two moments of disappointment. First, I seem to have lost - already - the spoke magnet for the cadence sensor I bought with the unit. That was disappointing. As was the realisation that I need not have bought the cadence sensor at all. I'm not interested in how fast I spin my wheels, only how far I go and how fast...and the GPS alone will tell me that. D'oH!

A final word on Garmin...thay have a GPS unit designed specifically for dog owners, allowing them to track where the little bastard has run off to. I'll take two...