Last month I broke down and bought a Garmin Forerunner 301. I'd been resisting getting one of these things hoping a more compact one would come onto the market. My buddy Fred has a 201, and I liked that but it was a big bulky. Well one day I looked and the price had dropped below two bills so, well, I got one. I'm glad I did. I'll post a more thourough review of the unit soon. But what's most cool about it is that it interfaces with MotionBased, which is a kick ass place to slice and dice your data. They've got an agent that sucks the data right out of the device and puts it up to the website for your enjoyment, see below.
The race below was the Crystal Mountain Hill Climb Time Trial. It's a 6 mile, ~6% grade, with riders going off at 30 second intervals. After all the climbing I'd done in France, I figured this would be cake. Boy was I wrong. My training/motivation started getting spotty after mid-August or so, and it showed. If you time it right, you can peak for atheletic events. I think I managed to anti-peak because my performance wasn't good, and the whole thing hurt like a mo-fo. It's fairly steep at the bottom but changes enough it's tough to get into a rhythm. If you click through the data below, you'll see my HR pegs at 95% from about 1:30 into the ride and goes up from there. Ouch. Anyway, click "View Activity" then "Dashboard" and you can poke around at the data, it's pretty cool. This was my first real ride with the Garmin. If you've got Google Earth, there's a button on the website to show the data in there, so you can see the climb, how close it is to Mt Ranier, etc., and even look at my other workouts (click on the "shawnb576" link).
Here's the Google Earth image:
