Now that your Forerunner is fully charged, knows where it is, and has been personalized to meet your every need, lets head out the door and turn it on. Use the minute or two that it takes to get a satellite lock to warm up with a brisk walk or an easy jog. It probably doesn't make any difference, but try holding the Forerunner over your head as you jog along so that it is closer to the satellites. That will make your neighbors wonder.

When you hear that wonderful beep that says "I know where I am", you will see the default timer screen. Push the start button (yeah, its buried in with all the other buttons) and start running. If you are also using a heart rate monitor, start that as well. (Did we tell you that the Forerunner does not have a HRM option...pitty, but then you do have a Polar HRM don't you? If not, you should probably spend your money on a heart rate monitor before buying a pace and distance monitor.)

After you have pressed the start button, you will see your elapsed time in big numbers across the top of the screen, and your pace and distance in two smaller windows at the bottom of the screen. The pace jumps around quite a bit and is really not all that useful if you want to know "how fast am I running at this very second". You can turn on some smoothing functions, but that only helps some: you will still see the pace fluctuate quite a bit. (All speed and distance monitors have this problem reporting current pace.) But it all averages out to be pretty accurate, so you are probably better off watching your lap pace instead of your current pace.

And that brings us to the lap screen. Push the button on the extreme right, the up button, and you will now see the lap screen. This screen displays your lap pace in the big window along the top, the lap time in the small window in the lower left, and the lap distance in the small window in the lower right. If you want to view the variables you selected for your custom screen, push the up button again. Continuing to push the up button cycles you through the three screens again, or you can push the down button to go through them in the opposite order. Navigating between the various screens is quite easy.

If you have set the autolap feature, the Forerunner will automatically trigger a lap at the distance you have selected. You can also push the lap button (hidden among other buttons) to record a lap. If you have set the autolap feature and push the lap button then the Forerunner will restart the autolap from when you pushed the lap button. Or put another way, the autolap and manual lap functions work together and not independently. If, for example, you want the Forerunner 201 to record a lap every mile, but you always run 0.9 miles as a warm up to get to your route, you can push the lap button at 0.9 miles to record your first lap. From that point on the Forerunner will record laps an one mile intervals from when you last pushed the lap button, not from when it was started. That means that you will have laps recorded at 0.9 miles, 1.9 miles, 2.9 miles, etc.

Speaking of laps, if you want to stop to stretch, tie your shoe, or stop for some other reason, and push the stop button, the Forerunner will record a lap. Garmin should change this. Lots of us stop for short periods to take care of some business or another and we don't want to count that as a lap. Until Garmin does change this "feature" users can get around this by using the Auto Pause feature. You can set the Forerunner so that it will stop recording your run if you stop or if you drop below a predetermined pace...a pace that you select. This is pretty slick and almost makes up for the stop-triggers-lap bug.

When you are done with your run, press the stop button and then hold down the lap button for three seconds to reset the Forerunner. You need to reset the Forerunner if you want to view the history of your most recent run, so get in a habit of doing it right away. This is different from they way many running watches work in that with a typical watch, pressing the reset button wipes out the history. With the Forerunner, pressing reset causes the Forerunner to file the last run's data into history.

While you are running you can also view a little diagram of where you have run and where you are heading. It isn't really a map, since you will not see any points of reference, but really just some breadcrumbs on an otherwise blank screen. You can program in some reference points of your own.

The Forerunner also has a feature that will help you navigate back to your starting point: a useful feature if you've bonked and can't remember who or where you are. Set this up and you will be able to follow a big arrow that points you where you should be going; it also beeps and provides an on-screen alert when you are coming up to a turn. When you use this feature, you will get an idea of how accurate the Forerunner is. If you always run on the left side of the road, the Forerunner will always be trying to gently guide you back to the other side of the road on the return trip. On the negative side, if you are running on a wooded and twisty trail, the GPS's inability to accurately track your location in these conditions becomes obvious.   [top]

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The Garmin Forerunner 201 is available at: