Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Garmin Virtual Partner

I have been wearing  my Garmin Forerunner 305 GPS for nearly a eighteen months and nearly 1200 miles and I am still finding features of the watch I haven't used.  The feature I have recently discovered is called a Virtual Partner.

I train exclusively in my hometown and have several routes I run on a routine basis during training.  The Garmin Forerunner uses the term 'course' to refer to a route that you run.  In a nutshell, I can save my most recent run on my eight mile 'Manhood tester' route as a course.  Then the next time I run this course, the watch will remember both my route and my times along the entire route.  A visual on my watch will let me know if I am currently running faster or slower than the last time I ran this course.

A dark background indicates I am running slower than my base or control course/time combination. A clear background indicates I am running faster than my saved course / time(splits) combination.

You can also just program a distance and time into the watch that you would like to run and the Virtual Partner will keep you appraised of your efforts to maintain the prescribed pace.  For example, I could have plugged in five kilometers as the distance and twenty minutes as the total time I want to run to arrive at a four minutes per kilometer pace. As I am running the five kilometers,  the Virtual Partner screen will display if I am ahead of my goal pace or not.

I found the following video on YouTube demonstrating the Virtual partner feature.

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