Unless you're running on a track, treadmill, or in a race, you probably don't know how far you're traveling. The Garmin Forerunner 201 will help solve this problem. I purchased this unit in December 2004 and have logged many miles with it strapped faithfully to my arm.

Just to address some of the concerns I've seen in the reviews:

1) It does take some time to acquire a signal. If you travel more than 500 miles from home, it can take 10 minutes or more to figure out where it is. Aside from that, even staying locally it can take 1-5 minutes to fully acquire signals. This is a good time to stretch and get into a good frame of mind.

2) It's GPS, so it's only accurate to w/in 3 feet or so. This means over several miles, it may be off plus or minus a 10th of a mile. However, when you generally run the same routes, you get a feel for the average distance.

3) It seems to have problems under tree cover. If you're running in a straight line, this isn't a big deal. Once it gets it's next reading, it can figure out how far you've travelled. If you're on a twisting road or trail, it may not give you credit for the entire distance you covered while it was having trouble finding signals.

4) The log software is really cool. Download it from the Garmin website for deeper analysis of pace/distance/elevation/totals.

5) This is not a device for figuring out where you're going. If you're out on a run and you need to figure out how to get back to where you began, it is a handy aid. But some other reviewer apparently expected turn by turn driving directions. I never saw anything like that in the marketing for this device. If that's what you're looking for, you're looking at the wrong unit.

With all that said, I have found it to be a highly effective training aid. My speed sessions and long runs have improved considerably over the last year.

The Forerunner was the best product that I have purchased in a while. I just completed my first marathon 3 weeks ago and during my training I was having a very difficult time judging distance and pace because I was traveling every week. With the Forerunner, I was able to keep accurate track of actual miles run and pace, which was key to understanding my progress.

I've never had a problem getting a satellite signal. One of the nice surprises has been the "Training Center" software which you can download all of your runs into. This shows elevation, pace, speed, and time for every part of your race. Using this, you can see where you are starting to slow down, or what pace you are keeping when you are running hills.

I've heard that the distance isn't precisely accurate, but since I am a 'middle of the pack' runner I wasn't that concerned about +/- a tenth of a mile.

It's great having children who are gainfully employed.

Last Father's Day the three of them presented me with this great toy to aid me with my running habit of more than 40 years. The Forerunner 201 has a variety of helpful tracking, monitoring, and navigational features. The History function enables me to view your workout statistics broken down by individual laps, days, cumulative weeks, or your entire workout history

It even provides a map of my route. I can even save "waypoints" or locations to mark the coordinates of a place to which you want to return.

The large display is large and easy-to-read. I can even view it without my glasses, which I never wear while running. A rechargeable lithium-ion battery charge easily lasts the promised 14 hours out of the.

As a runner who usually runs alone, I love the "Virtual Partner." It enables me to set goals for each of my workouts. I then compete with a digital character displayed on the Forerunner's screen. I can then see visually track how far off the time, pace, or distance I am compared to my virtual training buddy. My digital character even stops when I do.

The software is great. It provides a visual record of my all my recorded workouts.

Over the years I have tried most of the running gizmos and been disappointed. Not so with the Forerunner. This is great. If you are in the market for a running watch, spring for this model. You will not be disappointed.

I hate running gadgets. I've never liked wearing watches, pedometers, heart-rate monitors. Even the Forerunner 201 didn't interest me until I ran with a friend who had one.

I ordered the 201 not expecting much, but was completely blown away once I started using the thing. Once up and running (more on that below), the GPS has been extremely accurate so far. Not only that, it has dramatically increased my awareness of my running and training.

Specifically, this unit makes it extremely easy to not only tell how far you've run, but also your pace and split times. The ability to (easily) program it to lap at certain points (for me it's every mile) allows me to analyze my pace over the course of my runs (which average about 10 miles daily). With the help of free 3rd party software easily found on the net, I'm not only able to analyze my splits, but to also download the Forerunner data and view it in 3D and color coded to look at my speed while climbing hills, etc. Some of the free software also does a 3D fly-by of your run.

The Garmin software that comes with the unit is also useful, if not a bit limited compared with the ample free software available online. Still, the Garmin Logbook is a great FREE tool that gives you quick access to your run data.

I have only a few pices of advice for folks considering buying the Forerunner 201. First, when you first turn it on, you need to be outside and be PATIENT. It might take 30+ minutes the first time for it to lock on the satellites. After that, it's much faster--don't worry. Next, if you're concerned about whether it's comfortable (based on the odd shape), I was too, but I've found that it is not a problem at all. It's very lightweight and the unit actually sits very naturally on your wrist/arm. Finally, just do a Google search for "forerunner software" once you get the unit. You'll find some good stuff available.

[Note added on 6/03/05: after an additional three weeks of product testing, I've revised upward, considerably, my view of the Forerunner 201. The model I describe below came with 2.20 software. You should download 3.50 software from the Garmin website; it greatly improves the device's performance. Although the upgraded Garmin still lags severely behind the Fitsense in heavily tree-overhung conditions--forest trails with full cover--it is every bit the Fitsense's equal in all other conditions. I've worn BOTH devices on my runs for the past few weeks and they track each other with almost uncanny precision. The Fitsense responds more quickly to changes in current pace, but if you set the Garmin for "lap pace" and set lap distance for 1.00 miles, you've got a nifty and useful setting. I recommend both devices highly.]

Here are some lessons distilled from my two-year experiment with the Fitsense FS-1 and one weeks's experience with the Garmin Forerunner 201.

The Fitsense and Garmin are based on entirely different premises, and therefore have entirely different strengths and weaknesses. The Fitsense works with moment-by-moment acceleration on the ground, through the mechanism of a food-pod accelerometer. When properly calibrated (and I'll talk about calibration in a moment), it can be very accurate. I've run 5 mile races and had it register 4.98 as I crossed the line. But its accuracy depends on many things: it varies with different terrain; with an increased or decreased stride rate (it implicitly encourages you to maintain a consistent stride rate; if you slow at the end of a race, it registers less distance); with uphills and downhills (it registers more distance and a faster pace going uphill; less distance and a slower pace going downhill); and with distance (if it's 2% short, for example, then it's obviously going to cut more mileage off a longer run). In large races where many people are wearing Fitsense and other wrist-devices, it goes haywire--or at least that's what it's done for me at the St. Jude Marathon for the past two years. (Other people's food-pod-to-wrist frequencies interfere with mine, apparently.) It does a great job on forest trails and in the vicinity of tall buildings, and of course it works great indoors. Properly calibrated, it gives you an almost immediate "current pace" reading; if I want to run 800s on a loop I've worked out in a local park, it stabilizes on current pace within a few seconds. There's no lag. On the other hand, the "current pace" it actually gives may oscillate 10-20 seconds a mile. Still, when you learn to work with it, it's pretty useful. If I want to run 800s in 3:00, I can look at the Fitsense and if it registers anywhere between 5:50 and 6:10--or if it bounces back and forth--I know I'm pretty much where I want to be. The "cumulative pace" reading is extremely useful in this context; after I've gone a couple of hundred yards, the cumulative pace reading is very accurate--although, of course, if the device is only 2% off, so that it reads 3:00 when I pass the half mile marker but the device itself reads .49, it's going to tell me that I ran a cumulative pace of 5:52 or so, rather than 6:00. I can live with that. For such short distances, I care about my measured loop, not the distance registered by Fitsense.

In races, properly calibrated, the Fitsense is, again, pretty accurate. But since it tends to register more distance--and thus a faster pace--at race paces (or perhaps at slightly increased "race stride-rates"), it may show me a cumulative pace that is 5 or 7 seconds a mile too fast. I may think that I'm right on a PR pace, then discover as I approach the finish line--if I haven't been paying attention to my actual time at each actual mile marker--that I'm lagging. What I actually do is use the cumulative pace as a general guide, but then make a point of hitting the "lap" button at each mile marker so I can go back after the race and find out what my splits actually were.

That's the Fitsense. It's a pretty good device. I calibrate the footpod by running a carefully-measured mile (measured with my accurate bike odometer) in a local park. If it reads too short of too long, I reduce or increase the CalVal a couple of points. That's at training pace. Prior to a race, I increase the CalVal a couple of points; that seems to work.

What about the Garmin?

Well, it CAN be extremely accurate, under certain circumstances. I first became aware of the device last September, when I was in the middle of the Tupelo 14.2 miler and realized that--perhaps because of the "increased stride rate during a race effect"--that my Fitsense was a full two-tenths of a mile off at the 7 mile point, and that my cumulative pace reading was, accordingly, about 20-25 seconds off. A guy I pulled even with was two HUNDREDTHS of a mile off. What was he wearing? A Forerunner 201. So I made a mental note to investigate the device. When I checked out this Amazon website, I found 150 posts about the Garmin and two about the Fitsense. The love-hate thing about the Garmin seemed to tilt noticeably towards the love, and the haters sometimes didn't seem to know how to optimize the unit. (I'm willing to believe that I haven't yet learned how to optimize it.)

The Garmin is clearly extremely accurate--more accurate than the Fitsense--on relatively flat or gently rolling courses that don't have much tree cover. I was astonished at how well it tracked with my bike odometer (without a single dropout) when I rode the Double Decker certified 10K course here in Oxford--EXCEPT for the miles in which the road narrowed and had tree cover, and/or went steeply uphill. Then it recorded less mileage.

When I ran on forest paths, however, its performance degraded severely.

The Garmin is not good--and clearly inferior to the Fitsense--in the matter of current pace, particularly quick response to current pace. When you start from a dead stop, current pace begins at 35:00/mile and slowly descends through 12:00, 11:00, down to whatever you're actually running. It takes at least 30 seconds, or maybe even 45 seconds, to register current pace accurately. So that for a particular application that's important to me--knowing what pace I'm running after the first hundred hards of a race and making small adjustments--it's distinctly inferior to the Fitsense.

Too, if you happen to pass under trees in the course of your run, the "current pace" begins to drop as signal is interrupted. This happens, I've noticed, even before the "low GPS signal" beeper chirps up. Then, when you come back out into the clear, the current pace reading sags in the other direction, to somewhat slower than you're actually running, as the device tosses all those missed hundredths of a mile (due to the momentary dropout) back into the averaged momentary pace. The phenomenon I'm talking about takes place when you set the device for "least smoothing." Of course if you set it for "more" or "most" smoothing, you notice none of this. That's because you've set your Forerunner up to be extremely unresponsive. When you set it on "most smoothing," the device is worse than useless for the sort of "repeat 800s on the road" interval work I describe above. Since ALL of its current pace readings are highly leveraged--actual current pace effectively averaged with current pace from 10 and 20 seconds ago; or rather, distance traveled in the last ten seconds averaged with distance traveled in the ten seconds before that--I want the least possible smoothing, which is to say the least possible moment-by-moment inaccuracy. This is especially true in race situations, where a momentary surge of 10-15 seconds a mile makes a huge difference in whether you're running the redline or over it.

One significant advantage of the Garmin over the Fitsense: on a flat open course, the Garmin is simply.....accurate. It doesn't need calibration. It doesn't gain or lose fractions of a mile if you slow your stride rate, or change surfaces. And as far as I can tell, it's unaffected by other nearby runners wearing wrist gizmos. So for a half marathon on country roads without tree cover--I'd go with the Garmin, if I had it, which I now do.

For forest trail runs, or for runs where I know I'm going to be dealing with tree cover or tall buildings, or for runs where my current pace is particularly important to me, I'm going to go back to the Fitsense.

There's more to say, obviously. Both devices are simply useful tools--and yes, as some have said, both can precipitate addictions! I'm continuing to experiment. I hope I've made clear that I'm willing to look honestly and the strengths and weaknesses of both devices, as I've discovered them. The Fitsense is fantastic--when it's not maddening (as it was for me at last year's St. Jude, where I simply abandoned all attempt at letting it register my mile pace (since it was registering 25% too short) and simply hit the log button at each mile marker, so I could do the postmortem with accurate splits.) From what I've seen, the Forerunner does a couple of things better and slightly more things not as well

I have looked at the previous reviews, and I have to say that I have encountered none of the problems that some of the other reviewers have. I was able to get the unit up and working the first time I used it. I have used it in Kansas and Georgia, and have had it drop the GPS signal about once a week at most, regardless of weather conditions. I have one spot where I regularly run where the trail actually goes under a building, and sometimes I lose signal, sometimes I don't. The unit always picks up immediately when I come back out into the open. Because I am left-handed, I took the unit off of the strap and turned the strap over to make it easier to put on my left wrist. I had no problems getting the pins out and back in. The only tool I used was fingernails. I am very happy with the accuracy of the unit, unlike the types that have to "learn your stride" in order to be of questionable use. If you read the instruction book, you know that it has to boot up for about 30 minutes the first time you turn it on. After that it only takes a couple minutes to start up. Usually it is ready before I finish stretching. I have to admit that I use a paper log book, so I have not tried to connect it to a computer. Maybe I'm not getting the full use, but for distance and pace it is fantastic. I won't run without it if I have a choice.

The Forerunner 201 is proving to be very helpful in adjusting my runs without a training partner. While I prefer running with another person, it's hard to find someone at the right time who wants to run the same pace that day. Features on this unit like the virtual training partner help me overcome that issue.

NOTE FOR IMPROVED SIGNAL/ACCURACY: On my first several runs, the unit lost signal about ten times over four miles. The solution was to have the Forerunner "Autolocate" the satellites again.

To run Autolocate again, turn the unit on indoors and cover it with your hand to prevent it from finding any satellites. After a minute, the unit will ask if you are indoors. Answer "No." Then it will ask if you've moved the unit more than 100 miles since the last use. Answer "Yes." This causes the unit to reacquire all available satellites.

Take the unit outside and position it in an open area. This time I made sure that it was clear of any obstructions (30 feet from the house) and put it on a tree branch about eye height. After about 15 mintues it had acquired more satellites than the first time.

When I power it up now, it acquires the signal in about a minute and I have yet to lose signal on a run.

First the bad:

The Forerunner 201 looses the signal in cloudy weather and trees (even trees without leaves). I have a 5.5 mile loop I do on dirt roads and a short trail and the Forerunner has measured as little as 5.1 and as much as 5.9 miles for this loop. That's not very accurate at all. Sometimes it looses the signal for quite awhile and straight-lines the route from the point it lost the signal to the point it picked it back up, which can shorten your recorded mileage by quite a bit. I have no idea why I sometimes get longer than the actual route.

In downloading software off the Garmin web site, if I did something else, the download would abort for some reason. Not sure if it was Internet Explorer or their site, but normally when downloading files, I can browse other sites without the download stopping.

PC only - no Mac support.

Uses PC Serial interface. The world has moved on to USB. When downloading data from the watch into Garmin's training log, I get a lot of failures. On second or third try, it always works, but you'd think you'd never get a failure.

The log book graph of your pace/speed is terrible. It shows me running under 4:00/mile at times (which is impossible) and up to 20:00/mile at times (which I supposed is possible but not likely).

Now the good:

I was very frustrated initially with it not being very accurate, but I really like having at least a rough idea of how far I ran and I'm looking forward to using it cross country skiing this winter. I never know how far I skied or how fast I'm going. Now I'll have a rough idea.

I like the way it does the auto-lap every mile, but it doesn't beep loud enough for me to always hear it and look at how fast I ran the last mile.

The virtual partner is pretty cool, although I've gotta set him to run a slower speed, I haven't beat him yet. :-)

I like the way you can configure the display to show whatever fields you want, like elevation, but wish they had 4 areas instead of 3 because I want to display: Current Pace, Distance, Elapsed Time and Elevation, but I can only choose 3 of those 4. I also wish your selections became the default rather than having to navigate through the menu's to you custom display every time you go for a run.

But - overall, despite it's limitations, I've worn it on every single run I've gone on since getting it and I've run every single day since getting it - so - I'm finding it quite motivational.

I have a big fear that when the leaves come back on the trees next Spring, I'll find out this thing will be useless, but hopefully, that won't be the case.

Bicycle Mounting Tip:

If you want to mount this on a bicycle and you have that foam insulation on your pipes in your basement don't buy the bike mount. Take a little insulation off your pipes (maybe 2") and put that on your handlebars and then strap the forerunner on. I did this once with a heart rate monitor and it worked well and cushions the unit too! But best of all - it's dirt cheap.

I've ran 3 marathons and I'm eyeing my fourth in a few months. I don't know the exact distances of my training runs, so I decided to buy the Forerunner 201. But then I noticed that Garmin has another model called the Foretrex 201. The other model has WAAS enabled which means up to 3-5 times more accurate readings! Also it has other GPS features that the Forerunner lacks. However, the Foretrex lacks features like calorie count and pace (minutes per mile). But I don't need a calorie counter and I can do math (going 7.5MPH is equivalent to 8:00 minute/mile pace). Furthermore, I hike once in awhile so this would be a nice little addition to my hikes. So I ordered the Foretrex 201 and tested it out. It works really well, especially in DC. I've been using it for about 2 monhts now and I have yet to lose a connection. It works in cloudy weather (done that several times) and near buildings and near trees. It seems like people are having trouble with the forerunner 201 and it's accuracy. I don't have such inaccuries with my foretrex 201, maybe because it's WAAS enabled. I use Sportsim software (free download from sportsim.com) to download the tracks onto my computer and it displays pace, route, distance, and elevation. You can even put a map on the background and see your route in reference to a real map. This is how I check the accuracy of the device. On ALL of the routes I've downloaded and overlayed on a map, it has been spot on (actually, it is sometimes off by a few meters, it's not perfect)! Conclusion: The Foretrex 201 and Sportsim are a killer comb if you want to keep track of accurate times and distances.

I have had the Forerunner for close to a year now and felt it was time to give it a review. For the most part I love it however for me it takes a very long time to aquire a signal on start up. I'd say close to 8 mins on average. On the upside this makes me walk a bit and stretch while it is aquiring the gps signal. The unit has trouble holding a signal under any sort of adverse condition such as very minimal tree cover. It will lose a signal even with no obstructions. Very odd. I am in the Bay Area and I think that has something to do with it as I have noticed other reviews having the same issue who live in this area. If you run on trails with tree cover don't get this device. It will not work reliably. Lastly if you want a serial to usb converter don't get it from Garmin who charges close to $50 for it. I have seen a converter for $17 on other websites.