Racing With A Garmin Forerunner

by Bryan on 4/19/2008 at 7:12 AM in Health and Fitness

It's racing day today--the Fort Worth Zoo Run Run 5K/10K. Julie and I are doing the 5K. This will be the 3rd race that I've run since buying my Garmin Forerunner 305, and I am curious as to how other people with Forerunners utilize them during a race?

In the previous two races (the Cowtown 5K and Bunny Boogie), I've set a quick workout for pace and distance. The allows me to just worry about hitting start, and then I keep the display on pace to make sure I'm not too fast and not too slow. Of course, if the course is off a little, or if I am not running perfect tangents, then the Forerunner will finish the set distance somewhere besides the actual finish line. So far, though, my Forerunner times have been pretty close to my actual finish times. However, in today's race, I am thinking of just hitting start and then manually stopping it at the finish line.

How do you race with your Garmin Forerunner, or other, similar device?



Legacy Comments

Hi Bryan, I got a Garmin 305 for my anniversary last month. I used it during a race for the first time last weekend. I'm afraid I didn't use it very well. I remembered to turn it on before the race so it could find a satellite, but I completely forgot to start the run until I got to the first mile marker. I didn't think to hit the lap button at the other mile markers, so I didn't get good split info. Mostly I just saw what I already knew -- the course was hilly, I slowed down a lot over the last 5 miles, but I was running pretty fast at the finish.

Posted by DatabaseDiva on 4/21/2008 1:26:02 AM

As I mentioned in the race report for my most recent race, for the first time I just hit start/stop at the starting/finishing lines, and this turned out really well. My Garmin time was 26:31.17 and my official chip time was 26:31.1. I also have my Garmin set to Auto-Lap at every mile. Of course, one thing I forgot to turn of was the heart-rate alert, so that beeped constantly during the race. Oops!

Posted by Bryan on 4/22/2008 1:14:17 PM