Gear Review: Garmin 405 GPS Watch

It wasn't all that long ago that if you wanted to know how far a run was, you had two options: you could either drive your running routes and check your car odometer, or you could time the run and estimate how fast you were running, then divide the time by your estimated pace to get the miles. The first method was often inconvenient. Who really has time to drive all their routes? And what if your routes take a shortcut across someone's yard or go down a trail or something? And the second method was woefully inaccurate. I can't even tell you how many "long 7s" the Bucknell women's team had, because we decided to assume we were always running 8:00 mile pace. Only it was the fastest "8:00 pace" in the history of the world, and a lot of those runs were 8 miles or longer. Then came MapMyRUN. Now you could figure out how far your runs were by tracing the route on your computer. It still was a little problematic if you ran on trails or MUPs, but it was a huge improvement over the "divide by your pace" technique. It even showed little mile markers on the map, which should have made figuring out mileage for tempo runs a lot easier...except that a mile marker in the middle of a long road on a computer is nearly impossible to figure out in the real world. And for some reason, my team still didn't adopt this, so our distances were still short (which makes me wonder what my mileage really was in college...hmm...). Then in fall '06, one of the freshmen showed up for cruise intervals with this big freaking computer on her wrist and told us we were running 20 seconds too fast per mile. No one believed her...but then our coach yelled at us for going too fast. That was the Garmin Forerunner 205. A few years later, a sleeker version was introduced: the Garmin Forerunner 405.