Garmin Forerunner 10 | Review

For those of you that follow the blog regularly, will know that I started running again in the summer, to get fit again and lose some weight. There was one stage in time, pre-children that I ran a half marathon, so I know I can run and know that I (kind of) enjoy it.

When you’re unfit though, it’s not as enjoyable. My mother-in-law introduced me to parkrun – a free timed 5k every Saturday morning. I thought I’d run by myself in the week and then do a 5k on a Saturday morning.

I started out and my time was 33 minutes.

Bad times.

Then, with extremely perfect timing, I was offered to review a Garmin Forerunner 10 training watch! It really helped to motivate me and get me running more.

Firstly, there are a lot of things you can do with the watch:

• You can just use it as a regular watch
• You can simply run and it will tell you how far you want and obviously the time it took
• You can put in your weight so that it can calculate calories
• You can upload to your computer so that you can make a training schedule and mark out how far you want to do each time, which I did – brilliant
• It tracks your pace and uses a pacer
• The watch keeps records and stores how many runs you have done and your best times etc

I wanted to improve my 5k time and when you’re out running by yourself, it’s not very motivating (at least I don’t think it is). But, the Garmin has the perfect thing for that – a pacer! You can programme in how fast you want to aim to go and it will let you know if you are ahead or behind on time. This is my favourite feature and makes it suitable for not just beginners but more seasoned runners too. Everyone can set a pace – it will just vary what that is. My official PB to date is 30 minutes, doing 10 minute miles with the pacer. I did do a few quicker miles here and there, so it really helped me have something to work towards.

You can keep track of your records, such as your longest run in terms of time and distance, calories and pace. So handy to know – particularly if you are training for a specific race like a marathon.

The watch is clear and easy to use. If you want to just head off and run, you need to press one button and then you’re off! It comes in a variety of colours so suitable for both males and females. I really enjoyed using the watch and I think it is fab – I would definitely recommend it. The RRP of the watch is £99.99 so I would only really recommend it if you’re pretty serious about getting into running, or you’re already into running.

The one downside I found with it was that, as it works with GPS to track your distance, if you’re running in quite a secluded area and there isn’t much ‘signal’, you obviously won’t be able to track the distance. Having said that, this did only happened to me once, when I did a parkrun different to my usual one.

Rebecca x

BlogLovin’ | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram

*I was sent the items for review purposes but all thoughts are my own.