I was happy yesterday that I finally got my new Garmin training watch via FedEx.. unfortunately it didn’t get in until AFTER I got back from my 22 miler. I did get the opportunity to use it today though and kind of break it in, and my first impression of it is that it works well. I’ve always been a computer geek (and actually am for a living now, but in a slightly different form), but its amazing the kind of data that this new watch pulls about the way I’m running (and training).

I headed out for 12 miles today with my new Garmin, despite the rainy and damp weather. It was warm out, so the rain didn’t bother me so much. The course that I chose for tday ewasn’t terribly hilly, because I needed to stay within 2-3 miles of my house, but still offered a decent amount of hills. Even though i’m not a big fan of heart rate monitors, I can see their value so I decided to strap that on, synced up the GPS and was on my way. I never ran with a GPS before, so it was interesting to see what the actual mileage was on some of the normal courses that i’ve been running for awhile now.. I was actually short a tenth of a mile based on the GPS vs. gmap-pedometer, so not too bad.

The thing that did bother me though is that it seemed like the heart rate monitor wasn’t constantly picking up my heart rate … although once I pulled the data off of it, it seems like it did. The watch is supposed to “auto-learn” my cardio zones, which i’m not sure exactly what that means, but its currently set to have the split between zone 3 and zone 4 at 150bpm … which means that for today I spent 1 hour and 2 minutes in Zone 3 and 42 minutes in Zone 4, which I think is pretty good. My average heart rate was 147bpm (so high-Zone 3) and my highest heart rate was 169bpm (high-Zone 4), but the weird thing is my highest heart rate came in the first mile of the run … maybe because I went from warm-up into my run, my body was just adjusting I guess.

One of the best features is the fact it tells me how many calories I actually burned (if I have it set right).. right now the watch figured the calories based on a 150-lb woman (the default), which isn’t even close to being me, but I figure if it calculated 1572 calories for the workout despite being setup wrong, that is pretty good and more data than I had before.

The one thing that kept throwing me off was the pace because it kept jumping around all over the place .. i’m not sure if I need to set something differently, but it’ll be something to look into.

So another week down, 66 miles this past week will probably be the high for this short session before the 1/2 saur 1/2 kraut marathon in June. As I wrote the other day, we’re heading to the beach for the Memorial Day weekend, so training won’t be my priority (although i’ll still run).. then its time to head back into a taper again to wrap up the spring marathon season.

Don’t forget to mark June 2,2010 on your calendar since its National Running Day. Be sure to make a plan to visit and event and persuade someone into doing what we all spend so much time doing (running).