My Garmin Forerunner 405

My wife knows how hard I train. She hears my alarm go off every morning at 4:30am. She has the joy of hearing all about my training session every evening when I get home from work (or when I get my morning phone call from her once our little one is up). I tell her with excitement about how great I felt or if I break through some milestone. She also has to suffer through my complaining if it was a bad day. I know that she isn't always (if ever) interested in my specific workouts, but bless her heart, she listens and always offers words of encouragement.

If you've read this blog for any amount of time, you know that through the last two years of triathlon training I have progressed from just a stopwatch; to a stopwatch and a separate heart rate monitor; to a watch that combined both. After having two friends tell me how awesome their GPS-enabled watches were, I started to look into getting one. Having all the capabilities of my stopwatch/HR monitor PLUS being able to know instantaneous and overall pace while I'm training was the main thing that had me envious of my friend's new toy.

The only reason that I hadn't bought one for myself was the cost (they'll set you back a couple Benjamin's). It was clearly and want, not a need...so I wasn't going to spend the money.

To my surprise, after my non-prize receiving 3rd place finish at the Tom Sawyer Triathlon, my wife decided that she wanted to get the GPS-enabled watch that I'd been wanting. I was surprised that she knew the exact watch that I wanted (Garmin Forerunner 405), and it was funny to listen to her rattle off all of the features the day that she surprised me with it. I guess I had mentioned which one I wanted a few several times.

So not only does the watch give me more info that I can even use while training, it allows me to wirelessly download ALL of this information to my computer...and more importantly, to the Training Peaks website. This is the website that I will use from now on for planning and tracking my workouts. Here's some screenshots from the Training Peaks website (click on each picture to view a larger image - then use your browser's BACK button to return to the blog):

Calendar of all my workouts - if I click on one of them, I get the following pop-up:

This workout summary detail shows time, distance, speed, elevation gain and calories burned. I can click on the "Reports, Map & Graph" botton and see this:

The Reports page shows me info on how long I was in each heart rate zone as well as min, max and avg heart rate data. It also shows me how many miles I have on my current pair of shoes (I'm already up to 155)!

If I click on Map & Graph, I get what you see above. A map of my route and a graph showing heart rate, elevation and pace from my entire workout.

Lots of cool stuff from this website - all made possible by the Garmin Forerunner 405! What an awesome invention!

YESTERDAY'S WORKOUT:

BRICK

Bike

Covered 13.36 miles in 39:50 (20.1 mph). Good ride with lots of rolling hills and s steep climb at the end. I wasn't sure how I would feel after my week of battling a stomach virus, but my legs responded well.
Avg HR = 145 bpm

Transition

Approx. 2:40

Run

Covered 4.30 miles in 31:20 (7:17 min/mile pace). All the info pictured above from Training Peaks is of this run. My legs felt heavy for about half a mile, then loosened up. My body responded surprisingly well and I had a lot more energy than I expected. Taking Friday and Saturday off and getting lots of extra rest was the trick to my recovery - I should have done this much earlier in the week...I know better!
Avg. HR for the run = 165 bpm 

TODAY'S WORKOUT:

Bike

58 minutes on the bike. Nothing special here, just a tough Spin Class at the gym with lots of good intervals. Got the HR into Zone 4 for 15 minutes of the ride, and even touched zone 5 for a few seconds!
Avg HR = 140 bpm
Max HR = 162 bpm