Garmin Forerunner 405CX

I have a Garmin Forerunner 405cx and I love,love, love it.

*I love that I can set up various workouts on it for interval training, speedwork, virtual partner, etc.
*I love that it consolidates 2 devices into one. I was having to wear my HRM and use Runkeeper (for GPS and interval timing) on my phone.
*I love that the GPS is way more reliable than it ever was on Runkeeper.
*I love that it was cheap--relatively--so I don't worry about losing it or sweating on it or breaking it like I would if I had spent several hundred dollars on one of the "fancier" models.
*I love that I can look down at any given time to immediately see whatever data I'm interested in (pace, distance, heart rate, etc.) whereas with Runkeeper, I had to wait on the voice notify me or I had to pull the phone out of my amphipod pouch.
*I love that the connect.garmin.com website gives you lots of data about each run so you can easily see, for example, the correlation between heart rate and pace or elevation or whatever. Or you can see at a glance if your performance is consistently better or worse on a particular course or at a particular time of day, etc.
*And finally, I love that it's not quite as huge as most of the other GPS watches I've seen. It's not small by any means, but it could be worse.


There's nothing I hate about it, and there are really only 2 things I don't love about my 405CX:

*I DON'T love that there is no vibrate notification option. When running in a race where there's lots of surrounding noise (Rock n Roll half marathon, for example) I couldn't always hear the interval notification. I was listening to music on my phone anyway, so I ran an interval timer on my phone during the race, but it irritated me that I couldn't rely entirely on the Garmin. When I'm training there's not much surrounding noise and I can hear the interval notification on the Garmin even over my audio book/headphones, so I didn't know this was going to be a problem until race day. The race I ran last week was less noisy than the RnR, and I could usually hear the notifications from the watch, but I still ran the separate interval timer just in case.

*I also DON'T love that you can't edit the map on the Garmin connect website. Once or twice when it was overcast and I was running through a heavily tree-lined path, the Garmin map turned out a little screwy and there was nothing I could do about it. On Runkeeper, you can edit the points on the online map if there's a problem with it. If there's an option to do this with the Garmin, I haven't found it yet. This probably isn't very important unless you're as anal as I am.

I've been running with the 405 for a few years now.

Biggest downside is the touch bezel. I have to lock my bezel every time I run. But at this point I'm used to it.

Great watch. I got the new Timex run trainer that was designed to compete with the Garmin 205. It does what I need it to do and is a very good watch. I got instead of the Garmin because of the price. Garmin was 199. Timex run trainer was 185.00, got it for 185. Got 20 per cent off, plus another $5.00 and a $50.00 rebate. $93 for a good gps watch is hard to beat.

I used to absolutely love the thing. Now I've got a bit of problems with it, but the Garmin support centre is trying to fix that... Must be just having a faulty one (my luck..).

The only thing I don't like is that you cannot turn it off. I sometimes don't use it for a couple of days and even though I turn the GPS off, it uses quite a bit of the battery.