Bought the Garmin Forerunner 201 and got to use it for the first time yesterday. Really neat tool/toy. Gives you all sorts of info that you can record (for the anal types like myself). It is super easy to set up and is very readable while running. I do a lot of trail running in the seasons other than winter (living in Michigan you get a lot of the later) and was always guestimating how far, etc. Now I will be able to know what the distance is. Wondering about the grade of that really killer hill? If there are four sats in view it will give it to you in %'s. You can toggle it between pace for running and speed for the bike. During the summer it may not be super accurate in heavily forested areas but that is what spring and fall are for.
It has a moving map display, you can program in a virtual partner so if your buddies can’t make it and you need a bit of competition, you have it. It stores up to 3 yrs worth of workouts! Software is due out sometime in Feb (I would be willing to bet later, like Apr/May knowing how vapor ware can be).
It would be nice if Polar and Garmin could link up to embed the HRT in the unit, too. For $125 off of Amazon.com, a pretty cheap tri toy.
I love mine as well. Did one run in Canada with it and as I was going over the foot bridge it registered a 2% grade going up and -2% going down.
The only thing I didnt like was that when running with a friend (who also has one) and I were running on holidays in the Dominican Republic and our average pace over 1mi didnt agree by about 5-6 seconds and over 4 mi was off by 4 seconds. At any point in time we dissagreed by as much as 15 seconds.
I would have been more surprised if the two units would have been the closer. I think the RMSE for the Forerunner is only 49 feet. Hopefully the next Forerunner will be WAAS enabled so the RMSE will be around 3 meters or 10 feet.
I’ve been running with a Garmin Geko 201. It wasn’t designed for running but it is helping me with pacing and I now know how far my running routes are.