Garmin Forerunner 305

When I was getting serious about running about 2 months ago, I have started thinking about buying a running watch with heart rate monitor. After research, I zoomed into Polar S625x or RS200sd, Garmin Forerunner 305 or Suunto T4 Marathon. The Suunto is more expensive while the Polar require calibration of the footpod. After careful consideration, I decided and ordered a Garmin Forerunner 305 from eBay. The watch arrived a few days ago and today is the first day that I use it for a run.

The Garmin Forerunner 305 consist of the watch and heart rate monitor. It has a built in Li-ion battery charged via the cradle which also acts as connection to PC.



The watch is rather large and the battery only last for 10 hours. Therefore, you cannot use it as your daily watch. The Heart Rate Monitor belt is ok. Fits me and after a long 2 hour+ workout, it is still fine. Heart Rate seems to be of good accuracy and no issue at all. The watch use GPS signal to determine the distance and pace. Distance is very accurate. I went from East Coast Park carpark B1 all the way to area H and back. The distance shown is 19.8km which I believe is accurate. I can monitor my pace and it has auto-lap function which you can set a pre-defined distance as lap so that I can compare my pace and HR km by km.

The watch has a total of 7 bottons and is waterproof. Seems to be rugged.



The display can be programmed to display 2 to 4 pieces of information and has a total of 3 screen selectable. Info can be uploaded to PC. The connection is easy and upload is fast.
However, the Garmin Training Center software that comes with it seems to be very basic. You can also use it with the web-based Motionbased software also by Garmin. I will need to use it more to find out its functionality.