Garmin Forerunner 201/Excellent Training Tool

The Garmin Forerunner is an excellent training tool for all outdoor runners, inline skaters and cyclists. Using the 12 GPS satellites orbiting the earth, it uses triangulation to keep exact track of your position, speed, distance traveled etc. This isn't like one of those useless pedometers that try and use an estimated stride length to track your position. The Garmin Forerunner is dead on accurate. I'm an inline speed skater and train on a 2.375 mile bike path loop. When I do 8 laps, the Garmin says I've done 19 miles, not 18.9 or 19.1. Do the math.
It has so many great features I almost don't know where to begin. It has 3 customizable pages with 3 window panes in each page. You can put different data on each page and it's easy to page through them while you're running or skating by pressing the up arrow key. As an example my first page has the Stop Watch in the top window, Current Speed in the bottom left, and Total Distance bottom right.
My Custom 2 page holds the Current Time of Day in the top window, Max Speed in bottom left, and Average Speed bottom right. The next 3 are Lap Speed, Lap Time, and Lap Distance. Very handy for my interval training days. There are 19 different customizable window data settings available.
The other great feature I have to tell you about is the Virtual Partner. Want to go at certain pace ? Set the Virtual Partner to go at that pace and the screen shows you both in the top window. The Virtual Partner is on top and you on the bottom, along with where you are in relation to the Virtual Partner real time. You can set the Virtual Partner by Distance and Time, Distance and Speed, or Time and Speed. You can also set speed, time and distance alerts. Oh yeah, and it saves all your training in a History Menu that you can go back and look at on the screen or download to your computer with a serial cable attachment.
Not only is the Garmin a great training aid, it also has some of the standard features you find on the other Garmin GPS's. I just went to the Boston Marathon with my training partner. My plan was to meet her at the 16 mile mark, but I've never been to Boston. Before we left, I found the latitiude and longitude using the location sensor in Microsoft Streets program and punched the coordinates into my Forerunner 201. In Boston I took a train to what looked like the closest stop, but was turned around as to what direction to go from there. No problem. I just browsed to the Forerunners Go To menu and selected my pre-entered 16 Mile Mark entry from the list and the on screen arrow pointed the way. I walked right to it from 1.6 miles away. Remember this is a GPS for training. If you spend time in the desert or mountains you should have a full featured GPS made for that purpose. The Forerunner 201 does have some of those capabilities though, and they do work.
If you're serious about training, the Garmin Forerunner 201 is an excellent tool to help you improve your performance by keeping track of your data and through use of the Virtual Partner. I highly recommend it.