Once upon a time, I took the plunge and bought a Garmin watch, the Forerunner 205. It kept an accurate distance and pace, it let me slave over my splits, it helped me sail to a 12-minute PR in the Berlin Half-Marathon.
It was big and clunky (I bought an older Garmin model because it was cheaper), but it always got the job done. When Josh said he wanted his own Garmin watch, I very selflessly offered to buy myself a newer, cooler, smaller model so he could have this one. Such sacrifices! Enter the Garmin Forerunner 405:
It was green! It was smaller! It had all the same features of my Forerunner 205 in a cuter package!
Wrong.
Not everything about the 405 has been a disappointment; I like the touch bezel (although many users hate it) and it’s indeed more comfortable to wear. However, I’m not sure how Garmin managed to make a newer-model watch inferior to the older one. My main beefs with the Forerunner 405:
- Pace. I like to see my current pace on my watch. I don’t like to see an average lap pace, because I start my first half-mile at warm-up, slow pace before increasing speed. I want to see what speed I’m running in the moment. The current pace on the Forerunner 405 is all over the place and it takes quite a while to catch up to my pace. For example, if I slow for a crosswalk or a pedestrian, it can take up to a quarter mile after I start running again to show my real pace. Stop telling me I’m running 12-minute miles, dammit, ’cause I’m working way harder than that.
- Data uploading. Sunday, I tried to upload my last few runs into Garmin Connect. I hadn’t uploaded data since June 25, but I’d ran every day since. Garmin informed me I had no new activities on my 405. I tried several times and checked the history on the actual watch to ensure the runs were stored. Yup, they were. Eventually, I had to manually enter in my data (and got no split data, of course). Defeats the whole purpose of using a data program like Garmin Connect.
Rachael Cullins is a twentysomething American girl living in Dakar, Senegal, with her husband and two dogs. She blogs about her adventures in Senegal and travels elsewhere in West Africa. She will reside in Dakar until summer 2013, when she and her family will move to another foreign post as part of her husband’s career with the U.S. government. In addition to West Africa, she has traveled to France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Italy and Costa Rica and plans to continually add to that list.
