I liked the Garmin Forerunner 305 when I bought it as the predecessor to my Garmin Forerunner 301. It's a wrist-based GPS unit that has a nice screen and a lot of features. But when I started to do my 3 mi @ 150bpm benchmark run I found what I thought was a massive downside... the heart rate display was about three pixels tall and almost impossible to see when running.
So I generally shelved the unit and bought Polar's RS800G3, their first GPS unit. I've been a big fan of Polar for a long time. I've got years of data in my polar database... literally, four years worth of workouts. I have an S720i, an S625X, an AXN500 and an RS800G3. For race day I wear the S625X and put the S720i onto the bike so that I always have quick and easy access to my heart rate. For recent training I used the RS800G3. For swimming and random adventures I wore the AXN500.
But here's the thing about Polar: when it comes to heart rate monitors they rock but when it comes to everything else they are horrible. I sent my Polar Power Meter back to them three or four times and eventually just gave up, never trusting the data that it fed me. The RS800G3 does have a GPS unit but it is mounted on the armband and either has trouble communicating with the wrist unit or the reception software has poor smoothing. After months of playing with it I can say that I rarely trusted the pace information it was giving me.
And for the first time with the RS800G3, Polar really sucked with heart rate. They moved to a new radio technology for communication between the chest strap and the wrist unit called Wear Link Wind. Oh, they broke wind alright. Half the time it doesn't pick up my heart rate. It doesn't work under water. Interference from my headphones blocks the signal. Fuggeddaboutit.
I had already put the RS800G3 and AXN500 onto eBay when I started fiddling with the Garmin Forerunner 305 tonight. Much to my amazement, I realized that I could program three screens worth of display and I could choose heart rate, making it big and readable! Nice! So I set up my first screen with realtime data. Second screen with lap data. Third screen with average data. Beautiful.
Now I feel like I can leverage the excellent features of the Garmin. I've used training partner a few times and as I ramp up for races I'm planning on racing against myself week-to-week more often.
The Garmin Forerunner 305 is back on top! (The exclamation imparts a little too much excitement... but the period is a little too laid back. I figured I'd go with the exclamation and just let you assume that I'm really so dorky as to be that psyched about wrist-top screen data management.)
One of my big issues is having a single repository to store everything. To date I've relied on Polar's ProTrainer 5. Not bad. But I have a lot of devices, some not Polar. I've tried to switch to WKO+ a few times but I don't really like the workflow to download workouts. It's different between devices. Annotation is difficult to accomplish. And more often than not it won't read my Polars or Garmins directly... meaning that I end up using the native software to download to the computer and then I have to manually move it into WKO+.
They could make things easier by having a feature that prevents me from adding two of the same workout. With that I could just drag a whole folder over there and let it figure which stuff is new.
The other thing they need to do is get better about respecting the workout type from the device... Run or Bike. I often find that run workouts are logged as bike and vice versa.
Some of this is user error... I've never spent the time to really, really, really get to know WKO+. But I don't really feel I should have to. When I'm hot, sweaty and sugar-depleted I want a big honking "Download" button to take care of things for me. Polar's better about this, but not great. And Garmin's pretty darn good... plug in the device and it sucks in the new stuff.
As always, none of these devices or software packages does it all. Each has certain strengths and weaknesses. Marc's struggling to make sense of the power/gps/heart rate world. With all of the options he can get close but can't seem to make everything fit.
Three Months to Ironman Florida 2007 Plan