I just got my Garmin Forerunner 305 personal trainer w/ heart rate monitor today so I'm new to using it and I am hoping that somebody here has one too so we can get a support thread going where we can swap info about it, talk about the features, how to make it more efficient for our workouts, help each other with using motionbased.com, and to help each other to basically learn and on and on.

I'm going to cross my fingers and hope somebody has one here.

I have one! I haven't used it much because after I got it, I got a calf injury, then went on vacation, then came back sick. Its also been way too cold to go outside.

I've had mine for a week. My best piece of advice is to not use the Garmin training center software. For a more compherensive read out of data use the Motion Based online service. The format is so much better and the data you get includes weather, wind and a breakdown of length of time in different heart rate zones. If you have registered with Garmin, you can use the same password for Motion Based. There is the option to purchase the service but I find that the data thats free is enough.

http://www.motionbased.com/

Also if you want mile splits make sure you set your lap setting to record each mile as a lap or your entire run will be one huge lap. This runners world UK link shows how to do it.

http://www.runnersworld.co.uk/news/a...480#milesplits

I hope that helps. I love mine and I can't wait for this weather to get better so I can stop this treadmill foolishness. Good Luck.

I almost forgot: Go Steelers, I'll be rooting for them. I love Mike Tomlin from his days with the Vikings.

Thank you this helps!

I need to find out how to set the timer. I need to go from 60secs to 90secs for my C25K training. Bleh!

I use mine for biking, and unfortunately it's a little too cold right now for that. You can buy a great accessory to measure cadence and speed, if you're into that sort of thing. I am not much of a runner, at all - but have used it for little dog jogs in the past.

I have one, had the predecessor for 2 years and then this after I smashed mine in August so if you have any questions let me know!

I don't use either the Garmin Training Center Software or Motion Based. I've used both and I will occasionally load up to GTC, but MB was just more time and I log my running at www.runningahead.com and didn't need ANOTHER place to log.

Sass - I do think if you are creating custom workouts the GTC software works quite well. You can do what you want several different ways.

If you are doing even intervals (90 seconds walk/90 seconds run) you can do Training/Alerts/Time&Distance/ change your time to 90 seconds. This however means EVERY run it will beep EVERY 90 seconds until you stop it.

You can also go under Training/Workouts/Intervals/Time&RestTime if your walk and run intervals are CONSISTANT through out the workout (separate from warm/cool) like 90 sec run, 2 min walk and set up a workout there on the fly. Include a warmup (check box) Start it FROM THAT MENU and then when you are ready for your first run interval hit lap and it will beep times at you from then on with a 5 second warning . It will save your settings until you change them (except for the warmup part) but you have to start it from the training/interval/time&rest time menu each time.

The best bet if you have a program that is more complicatied something like "Walk 5 min to warm up, run 90 seconds, walk 2 min, run 120 walk 3 min etc. etc. etc. " is to build a custom workout. You can do it in the Garmin itself but it is a PITA (Training/Workouts/Advanced), or you can build the workout in the GTC software - once you play around with it its not that hard. Then you upload it to your watch and away you go! This is a good way if you are following something like C25K because you can set up 3 or 4 workouts to match whatever the week is, and then each week just EDIT them and reload them.

sports tracks at zonefivesoftware com/SportTracks/Downloads is good software and you can use google earth to map it.