The new toy! My Garmin Forerunner 301photo courtesy of the Garmin website: www.garmin.com

Oh, yes, it is. My new toy. I am a lucky, lucky girl.

Sometime back I returned my snowshoes to REI because they were pinching the top of my foot and I was worried about getting an injury since I am in them several times a week (I have such an awesome life that I can even say that last sentence). I ended up buying a pair of racing snowshoes on Ebay, so I still had a sweet REI credit waiting to be spent (Thank you Roger and Marla for buying me such nice snowshoes in the first place!).

My running partner has this Garmin and I was jealous big time! I used my REI credit to get it and it’s the bomb. It’s a GPS and a Heart Rate Monitor. So it can tell you where you are, how fast you are going, what your pace is, and how many calories you are burning, all in the same little wrist-watch-do-hicky. It has modes for running, biking, and other. It even has this Auto Pause feature where it knows when I stop running, like at a stop light and it stops my timer and all my stats, until I start running again...it just knows! What is even cooler is it’s all downloadable to your computer, and uploadable to your TrainingPeaks account. Another cool feature that I have been playing with is that you can program your workout on your computer, where it’s easy, and then assign it to a date, and then when you are ready to run you click a few buttons and it will start your programed performance. Soooo, say I want to run a 1 mile warm up, then I want to a workout where I do 1/2 mile running, and then 1 minute hard running and I want to repeat that 5 times and then do a 10 minute cool down. Well, it’s cake, you set up that workout on your computer using the very easy interface, assign it to a day, then on that day, you push go and it keeps track of everything and then beeps at you when you are changing to the next step and tells you what to do next. AWESOME! and REALLY FUN.

I really like the idea of assigning workouts because I generally take Monday, my day off, to plan my weeks workouts. So, I like that this is one more way for me to plan ahead and have my workout ready to go. Snazalishious!