Well it’s Monday and it has been a busy week-end, on and off
the trail. I ran the Tolt pipeline trail
as planned Saturday but I haven’t had time to download the GPS track from the
Foretrex. The navigation device did come
handy during the trail run. First to
find the actual entrance to the trail at the drop off point in Duval. I almost ran by I about ¼ mile into the
start of the run. The “off track” screen
indicated I was running away from it (I though) because the indicator mileage
was increasing as I was adding mileage to the run … later I found that the
mileage from waypoint continued to increase throughout the run so I have yet to
figure out how to interpret that data.
However the “off track” indicator is accurate in indicating how far off
the GPS route you are off. I could
switch to the Map screen where it showed my location and direction relative to
North and the route waypoints. I could
navigate to the waypoints ensuring my position stayed on the route. Another great feature I found was the elevation
screen, which I could zoom in and out and would show the relative elevation …
So that for example I could check if another uphill was around the corner of
this uphill …
Things I did not see on the Google Earth fly by was that
there was no bridge to cross the Sammamish river when the Pipeline Trail
crosses the Sammamish
River trail … Duh! Fortunately 145th had a bridge
about ¼ mile south of my position … My Iphone was still handy in deciding
whether to go North or South to find a bridge.
Had I went north it was a detour of several miles to 175Th. I rejoined the trail following the map on my
phone then reverted to GPS nav. Well in
this case I was following the trail but that sound pretty fancy when I write
that in here. The 405 waypoint (where I
had to exit off the trail to find the overpass and re-join the trail westbound)
came up on the GPS map. I followed the
map on screen for turns which lead me to the overpass fine however I ran by the
entrance again. I could see on the map I
was about to pass it, then could see my tracks leading away from the route so I
knew I needed to head back. I looked for
a trail entrance but could see only street signs. I headed west on the street that seem to be
where the map said I was offtrack. After
a visual scan I did see the trail entrance about 50 feet down to the left.
I hope to find some time to download the tracks from the GPS
device and transfer the tracks to Google Earth and see if I can create a movie
of my run … More to come on that.
Overall I am please with the purchase so far. On the cons I think Garmin lacks support for
the novice user (I had to research “how to’s” off the internet to figure out
how to create a map and transfer it to the GPS.
The pace information that the salesman at REI told me was supported by
Foretrex is non-existent (or haven’t figured where that feature is). The speed data and average travel speeds are
given in mph so it’s a little cumbersome to me as a runner since I am used to
min/mile. That is a very nice feature of
RunKeeper that helps me when I run long distance events. I can learn the conversion in my head from
mph to min/ile for common time to overcome.
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