Have you head of Garmin connect? Yes? No? I got my Garmin Forerunner 2 years ago and I just learned about it yesterday when Dave set up his new Garmin Edge 500 (for cycling).

It does a lot, but I don’t know all of it and I’m too lazy to go look it up, but here’s what I will tell you:

It just made training and mileage tracking super easy. Below is a screen shot of the January’s training schedule. The gray bubbles are my planned runs (starting 1/8) and the blue bubbles are the runs that have been uploaded from my Garmin.

Dave set my half-marathon training up for me! You’ll see that each week has a goal in a gray bubble on Saturday and it shows how much of that goal I have reached. You’ll see the “Weekly Totals” for this past week says that I ran 25.40 miles, but the MH Week 1 has my goal at 26 miles. Which is why “98%” is in parentheses next to the goal. I reached 98% of my goal. Not bad.

If you have a Garmin, you can go to http://connect.garmin.com and set up an account for your training.

You can create your courses and workouts online before you head out to run (or ride your bike). The information is downloaded to your device so you have it with you. And you can search other people’s courses and workouts if they have chosen to make them public.

The “Goals” tab is really cool because you can create a plethora of goals (mileage, time, speed, calories, frequency) and check your progress.

And obviously you can view each workout in depth. Here’s a screenshot of my run this afternoon:

Dave and I are enamored with this program.

Seriously.

Are you familiar with Garmin Connect? Are there other programs that you use to track your runs and training?