A match made in heaven... Polar S625X and Garmin Forerunner 305!

I love riding my bike! This year (2009) I'll be doing my 9th Argus cycle tour. I am yet to ride a GOOD Argus... My best time over the 100km ride is 3h58. However, I am sincerely hoping that I'll be able to ride a better time this year!

So, I've been taking my training a little more seriously than in years gone by. I need to spend as much time as I can in the saddle, particularly since I have to strengthen my left leg that I broke in February last year (see here for the early news of the break, here for a pic from hospital and here for a picture of the pins and screws in my leg).

I've been trying to do about 30-50 km's each time I ride (at this point it is every day, or every second day). It is going great!

I am blessed with some great equipment, for a few years now I've owned a Polar S625X heart rate monitor. It is my standard watch and an exceptional training tool. Three years ago Megie bought me the bike mount and sensor so the watch not only gathers information about my heart rate, it also gathers information about the speed I'm cycling, the distance I'm covering and the altitude that I'm climbing. That information is incredibly useful! Not only does it help me to chart my fitness and how I'm growing stronger, it also offers some great encouragement. Every time I look over the graphs and see my speed and strength growing I get an extra little boost! I'll say a little more about how I get the data off the watch in a moment...

My friend Paul has now given me a Garmin Forerunner 305 to use. It is a fantastic GPS watch that can also function as a bike computer and heartrate monitor. But, I don't have use of either the heartrate strap or the bike sensor. Still, it is a remarkable little machine! It captures the track that you ride and then exports that to your computer so that you can view the track map on Google Maps and also get information about your speed and altitude.

When one combines these two pieces of data from the watches you get a pretty great idea of how you're doing!

However, there is a huge challenge! These two watches don't share a common data standard, each one captures and stores its data in a proprietary format. To complicate matters even more the Polar has NO support for Apple Mac OSX whatsoever! So I have to 'hack' the heart rate and speed data into my Mac to make it useable.

So, what do I do? Well, sadly the only reliable way to get the data off the Polar is to use the Polar Precision software in a Parallels Windows XP Session on my Mac. For those who are wondering, NO you cannot use the Polar Infrared sensor with Parallels - I use a cheap USB IR bridge instead and it works like a charm!

Then to combine the information with the Garmin Forerunner watch I use a piece of software called Ascent - this works directly with the Garmin watch via USB, and it allows me to import the Polar heart rate monitor files (*.hrm) into the program. That way I can track all the data in one program. Of course the REAL solution would simple be to get a heart rate strap and bike sensor for the Garmin Forerunner! But, I don't want to spend the money on that now... So this solution should work!

Anyone have any better solutions to the two watches working together on the Mac?

Technorati tags: Garmin Forerunner, Polar S625X, training software, Mac, OSX, Argus cycle tour