I race Olympic flatwater canoes and like to road bike. To train smarter and record my workouts, I bought a Garmin Forerunner 305 a few months back. It’s awesome. It has a heart rate monitor coupled with GPS and using it allows me to see my boat speed, too. No more need to drag a stupid prop connected to a speedometer or other such tool. Everything is in this nice little package.

Garmin’s included software however, pretty much bites. It’s lacking a lot of features I would really like to have — like graphing, a map overlay, the ability to add notes, etc. After a little searching onthe Internet, I found Ascent by Montebello Software which does everything I wanted, and more. Check out this graph of a ride I did in Fillmore -

*This graph shows elevation, change in grade and my heart rate, and yes, that’s a 34.8 percent grade at the top of Balcolm Road.

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