Saturday, July 23, 2011

Garmin 305 Added To My Toybox

Amy gifted me a new Garmin last week for my b-day. It was much appreciated, and asked for. Dan from work told me last month he just bought a Garmin 305 after his old Garmin was stolen from his hotel room. He said he got it from Amazon for under $130!



What a deal! Since I parted ways with my Garmin 205 (no heart rate monitor), I kinda missed the toy, and the new low Amazon price was too much to pass up. I wanted to share my first run with the Garmin 305, a 2 mile time trial on TTU's track.

The purpose of the time trial was to benchmark my performance for future time trials and to try to determine my maximum heart rate. The time trial was preceded by a 1 mile warm up (at average heart rate 133 bpm and average pace 11:21 min/mile)and succeeded by a 1 mile cool down (at average heart rate 148 bpm and average pace 12:07).

My average pace during the 2 mile time trial was 6:48 min/mile. My fast pace was at the very end at 5:36 min/mile. My maximum heart rate was also at the very end of the time trial at 192 bpm. The max heart rate age formula for a man is "220-age". Based on my age, my max heart rate should be 178 bpm. Does this mean my heart is 14 years younger than my chronilogical age, or perhpas the formula is too general?



I love to run on tracks. It brings back memories of my more competitive days and gets my juices flowing. But my main reason for wanting to run the time trial on a track is for consistency with future time trials, and for the consistency of elevation. I wanted heart rate response to be only affected by effort and not by elevation changes. Curiously, the graph below shows the track elevation isn't as level as I presumed it would be. Maybe it's just the scaling factor of the graph, but 10 ft. of elevation change (east side 10 ft. higher than west side) seems not very level. I suppose this is a characteristic of Tennessee hilly tracks.

3 comments:

  1. Check you out with the HRM!

    I used to have one of those. My max was way beyond the predicted too. That was a while ago, though. I vaguely remember averaging in the mid-150s.

    You should see if your pace matches the elevation change a bit.

    I love all those meaningless graphs.

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  2. Hey Evanator99.

    Josh, I need to become more familar with the graphing features on Garmin Connect. I tried to blow up the scale on the pace graph, but it wouldn't magnify to the same high level that the elevation and heart rate did. I suppose I have to export data to csv file or something like that. In short, I'm sure your correct, as elevation increased, pace decreased, and vice versa. I'm probably going to do these 2 mile time trials every month or two as a benchmark.

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