I'm too arthritic to be a fitness fanatic, but my daughter is - she spends all her spare time running marathons, half-marathons, cross-country etc. (or training for them!). She swears by her Garmin (I think that's what it is called). Not cheap I gather, but she also managed to tell my husband (who had a stroke earlier this year) that he had walked .23 of a mile in about half an hour when she walked with him, so it must cover all speeds.

Edit - I just checked, it is definitely called a Garmin and is a GPS type.

Edited again - I said 2.3 miles, it was .23 of a mile! He hasn't recovered as well as that!

-- Edited by Madeline on Friday 6th of December 2013 09:33:18 PM

Bob in Spain wrote:

---

I am sure we have a few "fitness fanatic" types on here.  I am looking for some advice.

I want to buy one of those "watches" that you wear on your wrist and they measure distance travelled etc.  I have no experience of these gadgets and wondered if anyone here can recommend a particular make/model.  I have had a look on the internet and heard that the "movement sensor" type watches are cheaper but highly inaccurate, whereas the GPS tracking type give more accurate information. I would need the accuracy.

It would need to be suitable for measuring walking, plodding (calling it running would be an exaggeration in my case) and cycling. It doesn't need to be too sophistcated. I am not interested in heart rate monitoring or calculations of average speeds etc. Just need to measure distance.

Don't want to spend too much money either.  Actually I don't want to spend any at all, but Santa told me I have been a naughty boy this year so I will have to buy my own.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I need it for an upcoming charity event that I am planning.

Thanks, in advance.

---

 

I'm not in the "freak" category but I have a long-term ambition of doing half marathons, at the very least. 



The "motion sensor" thing is essentially this - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedometer

As you can understand, it's just a glorified toy and even some low priced MP3 players carry one.



A GPS based one will obviously be more accurate, but you can do without something as good as Garmin. As long as you're not planning to launch missiles or something, you can do with a tiny bit of approximation (upto 5%, and believe me, even the ordinary GPS devices will be much better). Do you have a phone that has an in-built GPS device? I'm still using my now ancient Nokia 5230 and I have manually tested the tracking and found it to be satisfactory.


Sorry for not going into the actual topic and telling you how much a device will cost. Unfortunately I'm not an expert on that.