Gizmos

Got myself a new toy to play with last week. Well more specifically I got my wife a new toy for me to play with last week. It was this.

This

This is a Garmin Vivofit. It is Garmin's entry into the fitness band game. I haven't been all that phased about the whole fitness band thing. In the best traditions of athlete snobbery, I tend to think they are a bit beneath me. By this I mean they aren't really aimed at me, given that they are essentially fancy pedometers, they are more intended for the fitness/weight loss crowd. If I want something to tell me how far I have run/walked and how quickly I have done it then I have a range of devices that can do that already.  

So given all that, why do we have this one. Well when I read that Garmin was producing one and what it would be doing, my first thought was, 'that would be good for Shell (my wife)'. I would be lying if I said that in the back of my mind I wasn't also thinking that it could also be cool for me.




So what does it do? Well it does all the usual fitness band stuff, tracks steps, estimates calories burned, does some form of sleep tracking, tells the time etc. The party piece though, and the bit that I thought was cool though was that the Vivofit also calculates a goal number of steps for you to aim at in a day. Initially it does this from the information you give it about your height, fitness level, age etc. But after that it tracks how many steps you do in a day and then uses that to calculate your goal number of steps for the next day. Hit your goal one day? Well the next day the goal will be a little bit higher. Miss the goal one day, then the opposite happens. Miss it a couple of days in a row and it drops quite a bit. On top of that it has a red light that comes on if you haven't moved for an hour, with reminders that come up every additions 15 minutes. The whole thing is aimed at getting you active and keeping you that way. It can also be used with a heart rate monitor to give a more accurate calculation of calories burned which is also nifty.









Taken in isolation, all the above is cool, but possibly not enough to make it jump out from the rest of the fitness band crowd. What put it over the top for us is that it is a Garmin product. I have had some hits and misses with Garmin products, but in recent years there have been more hits than misses. These days it is a brand that I have a fair bit of faith in. Plus we already have all the systems that Garmin use in place at home. This slots in with those existing systems nicely. 

So all up, would I get one? To be honest, for me, no. Now that we have one in the household and I have had a play I have come to realise that it doesn't really do anything that I need, other than tell the time, and I already have a watch for that. But for my wife, and others like her, definitely a yes. I have been impressed by the brains behind it, it is much more than a wrist pedometer. In my opinion the features built into in nail its intended purpose. Cool product.

Moving on to the rest of my day. Running time this morning, and the session was a bit of a blast from the past. If you go back to blog entries from about a year ago you will find posts about a session that involves running on beaches and then doing intervals. This morning it was time for that again. For those not interested in going back a year, in brief the session is this:

Warm up
Run on soft sand
Do intervals
Warm down

It is always a tough session, it is about 90 minutes long, has some high intensity work, involves running on soft sand and is aimed at making you run fast on tired legs. Ouch. To add a little extra spice to the session this morning, the wind was also blowing an absolute gale. It was so windy that at one point when I was running into the wind, on the beach, I think I may have actually stopped moving forward. The session went okay. The session took me a while to get into and the wind was a real pain. For most of the session the wind was unpleasant, but mostly just annoying, but for the intervals it promised to cause problems. The issue was that I didn't think I would be able to reach the target pace for the intervals when I was running into the wind, it was just too strong. In the end I solved the problem by doing half of each interval into the wind and then turning around. Not ideal, but it worked out in the end.

Despite the slow start to the session, I was pleasantly surprised by just how well the intervals went. They were hard work, but I was getting well under the target pace, so that was nice.

Bit of a spin on the bike tomorrow and if the forecast is correct the weather is supposed to be fine, so I am planning on doing it on the road. I had a mass bike cleaning session today, so hopefully the forecast is correct and my cleaning effort doesn't end up being for nothing.