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I've managed to pick up a Garmin Forerunner 610 with Heart Rate Monitor and a Foot Pod. Oh, and I grabbed the cloth strap as well for $19 because I've heard a few horror stories about the pins in the normal plastic watch band falling out. I may just pick up some LocTite or something if the band is fine.

The foot pod can measure your pace when you're on a treadmill (apparently treadmills are often quite inaccurate) and it can be calibrated by either running around a track once or twice or right off the GPS signal. But I'm looking at it more for the purpose of tracking cadence.

Next week I'll be on week six of the now eight-week Run5K (née Couch to 5K) app. Day three is "run for 20:00." Somewhat oddly, week seven reverts to running and walking ((The walks at the end are followed by only brief runs of a minute or two.)) before returning to runs of 25:00, 28:00, and 30:00 in week eight.

I'm somewhat anal about getting the times right (I don't want to mess up and short myself some time), so I plan to keep my iPhone running the app for the next few weeks, but I think in week eight I'll finally ditch it and just use the watch for my runs, and from there on out.

I'm happy to get the Forerunner 610. After suffering from some initial problems, it was reviewed quite favorably by Ray Maker and it's become a very accurate watch. I hope to get into more of a trail running mode (road running is okay, but not something I want to do more than a minority portion of the time) when spring hits, and the GPS capabilities here combined with the foot pod picking up the slack when GPS signal drops should be quite good.

The ANT+ Pod and wireless connection seem to be very nice. The Garmin Connect software and website are pretty cool and show a good amount of performance data. I may look into the GPS software I mentioned before as well so that I can have an offline collection of data. And apparently some folks really like an app called rubiTrack.

Oh, and for music, which I use as "background noise" that occasionally enters my thoughts when a really good song comes on, I'll use one of the small iPod Shuffles we have sitting around the house. It'll be nice to finally leave my iPhone in the car or at home ((Though part of me wonders if I shouldn't get something like a SPIbelt to carry my phone in case of an emergency or something.))!

P.S. I need to remember the trick of tapping the screen when it comes up to immediately set the FR610 to Indoors mode. It'll come in handy the times

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