Since the beginning of the year I have started running a bit more seriously after my brothers convinced me to run the Cape Town Two Oceans half marathon with them in April this year.

I also decided to buy a heartrate monitor to help me with my training. So after a bit of research I bought a
“Garmin Forerunner 50” heartrate monitor and footpod bundle. It’s been almost a month now since I bought it and I think it’s freaking awesome!!

The heartrate monitor gives you all the data you need to train effectively. One can set target zones for how hard one wants to train and the watch has an alarm which goes off when one is outside the range set. This can get a bit annoying if you are struggling to stay in the zone for the day, but then again you should plan how hard you want to train before hand.

The footpod is also great, it gives speed, distance, cadence and number of steps. It’s surprisingly accurate and when I plotted some of my routes on Google maps, the distance was out by a few hundred meters. It is however really simple to calibrate though, so once you do that it is a lot more accurate.

The most fun part about the whole system though is the software which is available from the Garmin website. Once installed on your pc it uploads data from the watch via a usb receiver (included in the bundle). Then the data is plotted on a graph and one is able to see speed, distance, heartrates, etc. Also it gives total distances for the week, which helps with meeting your weekly mileage goals.

Then, one can upload the data from the desktop application to an online version of it called Garmin connect. The interface is really sweet and its great to be able to view your workouts online.

Bottom line is, that if you’re looking for a basic heartrate monitor and footpod I would defintely recommend getting the “Garmin Forerunner 50“. Now all I need to do is run more