motivation and gps watches

radiat

hi,
up until now my times in races have been a lot better that when training (as you'd expect). But a couple of months ago i got a garmin. It's been a real motivator and i can keep an eye on it and try to beat my best all the time. So my question is to gps users, does the race day adrenaline have less of an impact when you're used to training with a gps watch?

ger664

Trying to beat your best time in all your training runs is not the way to do it.

pointer28

I just bought a Garmin 410 a few months ago and love it.

I'm a numbers geek at heart and love looking at all the shiny graphs and stuff it gives me on Garmin Connect.

I agree with ger664 though, trying to beat your times everyday will just wear you out either resulting in injury or a ruined race. In fact, I use my watch for just the opposite, making sure I don't overdo it. I train in HR zones and the watch lets me know when I'm going to hard.

seamus

+1 to what pointer says, I've really only been running a year at most so I find the Garmin really useful for pacing myself on training runs and avoiding pushing it too hard.

In races I find it very handy for pushing myself stupidly hard in a way that I would never be able to sustain on a training run. That is, I have a target pace in mind and if I notice I've dropped below, I can push on a little harder. Without the Garmin pacing me, running on feel alone would probably work out a lot slower or uneven. Especially on shorter races like 5k where you're running at 90%+ of max HR and you just want to die in the last 1km, having the pace there gives me the motivation to push on through it.
In training, even with the Garmin, I would never be able to keep myself going at that effort for 5k even if I wanted to.