I just treated myself to a new GPS watch.  For a few months now I’ve been moaning about the high price and massive size of GPS watches for running. They’re all ugly expensive bricks – and may do wonders for tracking your runs, but who can drop a couple hundred pounds on something you truly don’t like.

Then Garmin came out with the Forerunner10. In green, pink (US only) and black it’s finally a small-ish GPS watch under $100. It has all the basics you need to track your runs. It times the laps, provides a lap pace estimate and you can also see your calories and stuff.  But if you’re like me you just like to know how far you’ve been running and for how long.  (Sometimes I wish it would yell out LAURA WOW YOU’VE ALREADY RAN 12K BEFORE 9AM?!?!? but I’ll have to wait for the Humble Brag edition….) It connects to your computer via usb and uploads to the Garmin connect site like all their other watches and you can track all your stats from there.  The battery is better than my Husband’s Forerunner110 and the GPS picks up pretty quickly except when I’m trying to run in Central London under all the big buildings.

Check out my Forerunner10 watch being awesome on my teeny wrists at Le Grand Classique Paris to Versailles race last weekend.

So it’s great, but why did I buy it when I had the Nike+ (not GPS but pretty accurate and most importantly free) fitness app on my iPod that tracked my pace and distance on the Nike+ running website? Because Nike hasn’t convinced me with their new fuel measurement. Essentially they’ve made up a unit of measurement that tracks all exercise during the day and adds it up to an arbitrary number called fuel. I didn’t want to invest in an upgrade to my Nike+ setup to include GPS just to know how many fuel points I had. I want KMs and time. And Nike has less than stellar reviews on their ability to collect those on their watches.  They have great apps for people with iPhones and such, but I’m not one of those people nor do I like to run with weird looking arm bands to hold large phones. 

So, I’m back with Garmin and still keeping track of my progress on the Daily Mile which I like so much more than any other tracking site (both Garmin & Nike+ have pretty mediocre tracking sites). I still have a lot of love for Nike Running but just didn’t love their GPS/tracking aps.