The Garmin Forerunner 201 provides runners with a number of ways to look at their running history: a summary of your last run, daily detail, daily summaries, and weekly summaries.

The last run stats give you a good overview including run time, run distance, average pace, maximum pace, and calories expended. If you have set up the auto pause feature, it will also display rest time and rest distance.

The detail display shows you stats for each lap: lap time, lap distance, lap pace, and calories. The daily and weekly summaries display the same statistics by day or week, depending on how you choose to display the summary.

Of course, you can always upload your stats to your PC using the cabling included with your Forerunner 201. Using the Garmin Logbook software you can see breadcrumbs of your run, graphs representing pace and elevation, and summaries of your runs by week or day, and all the detail of each lap. More on the software below.   [top]

This feature allows you to program in a distance and pace (or distance and time, or time and pace) for your Virtual Partner. After you have programed in the distance and pace variables, you select "done" and you are asked to push the start button to proceed. If you have previously started your Forerunner, say you've done a warm up, the results from this warm up are filed and the Forerunner starts with a new file. The Forerunner provides a number of screens: one shows an image of two runners on the top half of the screen and how far apart you are on the bottom of the screen, and one that displays your pace and the distance between you and your virtual nemesis. (Now that you are running with your virtual partner, you will have to watch where you spit, because you are likely to always want to be in front of him...ahh...her...it.) Be careful how you use this feature. It is great for time trials or tempo runs, but you wouldn't want to use it everyday. If you do, you will probably end up pushing yourself more than you should. Remember, everybody needs recovery days.   [top]

You can set the Forerunner to beep when you go faster or slower than a pace you determine. The slow pace alert is not all that useful. If you set this feature you will find it beeps a lot: not only when you are going slow, but also when The Forerunner thinks you are going slow...like when the Forerunner has an obstructed view of the sky. The fast pace alert seems like it suffers less from the inevitable fluctuations in pace calculations.   [top]

This feature is really handy but could be improved some to make it more flexible. Perhaps Garmin will improve it in some future firmware update. (Garmin makes it pretty easy to upgrade the software that runs your Forerunner, but you will need a MS Windows PC. In fact, to use the interval training feature, you will need to upgrade to version 3.0 or higher.) The primary disadvantage is that you can only set the interval distance or time, the rest distance or time, and the number of intervals. So if you want to run some 400's followed by some 800's and maybe some 200's, forget about using the Interval Training, at least for now. Of course, you can always monitor your Forerunner yourself instead of waiting for it to beep at you. Still, even though the interval training feature is not all that flexible, it works quite well for straight forward intervals. And if you don't have access to a track, the Forerunner will help you with your intervals and repetitions even without the interval training feature.   [top]

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The Garmin Forerunner 201 is available at: