I maybe should have included this in my Christmas Catch Up blogs of a couple of weeks ago, but hey ho.
My big Christmas pressie from Jane was one of these:
Its a Garmin Forerunner 305 in case you were wondering... 
"What the Dickens is that?", you may well ask - in short, its a running watch that has all sorts of electromagical components that uses GPS technology like one of those SatNav gismos for the car - to track and store data about any runs, walks, bike rides etc that you may care to do. And after you have used it to track all that, you can then download your efforts to a computer and see how good/bad/slow/fast you are - which is particularly useful if you run the same routes. It also has a heart rate monitor, so you can see how close to death you are when clambering up that particularly steep incline 
Although I've had it for a little while, I'm now starting to get some good use out of it, mainly because I've started running a bit more regularly (which helps 
) and have a few runs of the same routes under my belt.
The first thing that it showed me is that I am completely rubbish at maintaining a steady pace - which is what you would usually aim for to manage a long distance run - but happily I now can use the Forerunner to tell me when I am slower or faster than my target pace - yey! ... It also showed me how unfit I am since Christmas, as my heart rate has been rather high on my normal training runs - boo! 
The good news is that all this analysis makes me concentrate on running within my boundaries, and so today I've managed to slice a good few minutes off my regular run time, without suffering a heart attack either.
My one single gripe about the Forerunner is that the software provided in the kit really sucks. No - really its awful. But happily enough there is a wonderful application from Zone Five Software that does all the things the Garmin software should - but doesn't - and its downloadable from here: http://www.zonefivesoftware.com/SportTracks/
