DMGNew Toy
I picked up a Garmin Forerunner 301 today, and I can't wait to get home and play with it.
It's a GPS unit and heart rate monitor rolled into one. So it does speed, and distance as well as calories burned, max, min, and average heart rate. And it'll export all that data via a USB port, so I can offload my workouts to my computer (and eventually, to my online training log).
So what? So I can do all kinds of data crunching: what's the relationship between speed, incline, and heart rate? How fast does my heart rate return to normal after a sprint or a hill or a set of lunges? Where's my lactate threshold? Where's my anerobic threshold?
At the moment, most of my aerobic training is focused on just laying down the bedrock: run twice a week, cycle twice a week. Nothing fancy, just cover the distance at a comfortable pace. That makes this the perfect time to start collecting baseline data.
Bottom line: I want to train smart, not hard. This is a great tool to help me do that. Plus, I'm just going to geek the hell out writing code to download and crunch the numbers.