Review: Garmin Forerunner 305

The Good
-Fairly accurate measure of vertical feet skied
-GPS keeps you from getting lost when skiing the backcountry
-Keeps track of calories burned so you know how many calories you need to consume to properly refuel
-Accurate heart rate monitor that can help you improve your aerobic fitness and anaerobic threshold.
-Keeps track of your average and maximal speed
-Decent Tracking Software

Needs Work
-Heart rate monitor’s chest strap had to be readjusted about every 30 to 40 minutes on the slopes
-Calorie measurement looks a little sketchy. I put an email into Garmin about this, but no reply yet. Hmmmm…..

I’ll admit it….I’m a bit of a “gear head”…especially when it comes to skiing. So when I received my Garmin Forerunner 305 GPS “enabled watch (more like a computer on your wrist) I couldn’t wait to take it out for a day on the slopes. I decided that the most opportune time to test the product was my day on the mountain with Dave “Mac” McGuire. “Mac” took me out for a lesson on how to improve my turns (more on this later in the week) and in the process I scored some pretty cool data from this mini computer. The watch tracked the following:
1. Average Speed
2. Maximal Speed
3. Average Heart Rate
4. Maximal Heart Rate
5. Vertical Feet Climbed
6. Vertical Feet Skied
7. Calories Burned
8. Pace
9. Distance Traveled

How is any of this relevant to your day on the slopes? To some extent the data is simply interesting to track over time to see exactly how many hours you’ve skied, vertical you’ve ridden and calories burned over the course of a day, week or season. Below are a number of other reasons data like this can be useful:

1. If you want to know how many calories you need consume to replenish your body to prepare for the next day on the mountain. For example if you look at the data in the screen shot at the bottom of this blog, it shows I burned approximately 2100 calories (note: by my own calculations I should have only burned about 1400 calories). If I wanted to make sure I was properly fueled for the next day I would want to consume at least half of that to make up for the deficit.

2. Runners and cyclists tend to look at milage as a gauge for progress. Your goal as a runner might be to work your way up to running a marathon. For skiers, we are more concerned about vertical skied. The Garmin 305” does a great job of using it’s GPS to track this data. This also comes in handy if you are skiing the backcountry and want to make sure you don’t get lost (the device helps you return to your starting point)!

3. Athletes use average and maximal heart rates as gauges of fitness. Over time, assuming you are skiing similar terrain, your average heart rate should go down if you’re fitness level is improving. The Garmin 305 helps you track this.

Overall the “305” is a good piece of equipment to help you track different pieces of data that may help you improve your skiing fitness. If you have a personal experience with this wrist-top computer or similar products let us know your experiences. Next time I will be reviewing watches from both Suunto and Polar so keep an eye out.

Andrew Hooge, CSCS