Garmin Data, Five Years Late

My Garmin Forerunner 305 is more than five years old. It was a birthday gift from my sister, who bought it for me because my husband and I mountain biked a lot on trails at that time. I'd told her stories of getting lost on trails, and the Garmin had a GPS and could be mounted to a bike. I never used it for biking, and  since I didn't run it remained in its box for two years.

I started using it three years ago when I started running, and it's been a constant running companion ever since. But I never downloaded the software to transfer the data to my computer. I wasn't serious about running until a year ago, and by then I'd pretty much forgotten about the software.

But this week I got a message that I needed to delete data since the memory was full, and I remembered the software. I cannot believe it's taken me so long to download the data, because, old-school graphics aside, I'm obsessed with the data!

This is the data from the ZooZilla 5K. Green shows elevation, red shows heart rate, and blue shows pace. It's very interesting to me that my heart rate mirrors the elevation until the very end, when the elevation drops but my heart rate keeps going up. I knew I felt completely beat at the end.


This is the data from the Jack-O-Lantern Jog. Again, my heart rate closely follows elevation until the end.


This is the data from the Buffalo Creek Half Marathon. This one is very confusing to me. The course was a slight downhill grade, which the elevation shows, but why is my heart rate so up and down like that? I know I was running a pretty consistent pace up until mile 9, so the pace chart confuses me too. Plus, I know I never reached a 20:00 pace! Maybe some setting is off?




Unfortunately, the graphs don't seem to go back more than about a month. Still, I'm having fun looking through my history. Even though I plan to upgrade my Garmin soon, I guess it's still better late than never to look at the data.