My partner in crime for a new route adventure was Stacy (tri buddy). The route was picked out on bikely.com and I typed out a cue sheet. But then I remembered the "course" function for the Garmin Forerunner 305.
It took me about an hour to figure out how to get the route off bikely (that was the easy part) and then into a format that the Garmin can understand. I will write a quick "how to" so that you guys don't have to go through this yourself. With the route in the Garmin, we were ready to roll this morning at 7.30am.
The route was listed at 50 miles, but we ended up having to do a little detour due to road construction.... It was about half an hour drive for me to get to the meet up point, but having "only" 1,700 feet of climbing over this distance, really sounded like taking a nice break from the foothills around here.
Oh and can we just say what a sweet relief a high in the 80s is, especially since we haven't seen temps like this since.... ummmm... April. For a split second, I actually thought I should have packed some arm warmers, but really, that would have been complete overkill.
Once on the road, I picked out the course and clicked "do course" and thought I would be done then. Well, since I didn't read the manual, I kind of was in state of trial and error for the first two miles until I finally ended up with this screen.
Or something resembling this screen. As you, see the display is a far cry from a car GPS and there is definitely no voice telling you to "turn left" etc. It's more like following a breadcrumb trail and I was really glad that I had a paper cue sheet with me... just to be safe. Because it was my first time trying the course function, I referred to the cue sheet fairly often, but really that wasn't necessary. Even with the detour due to the road construction, we would have been able to find back on the route just with the Garmin. I am a fan.... I don't think I will ever attempt a new route without this function, if I can help it.
Oh and we ended up with around 55 miles in 3.5 hours and certainly didn't kill ourselves out there. I am surprised that I was able to keep up at a 50 miler with only very little biking in August. My quads were screaming at me the last five miles or so, but other than that... Not a problem.
So long! ;-)
i somehow ended up with something like that going on mid-run. every so often garmin would beep and i'd look down and it would say "turn right/left". it was weird (no idea how it got on that mode), but luckily i could ignore it 'cause i knew where i was. there are so many features to garmin that i have not explored - i definitely don't get my money's worth out of it!
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