Be Alert; Your Country needs Lerts; setting Alerts in your Forerunner

A’ la my post from November about Forerunner features here’s a quick in between Christmas and New Years Day post about the Alert feature. There are four types of Alert; Time/Distance, Pace, HR and Cadence, I have used all four at times but this post will only review the Pace which is probably the most common one that I use and was certainly the most helpful in my recent speedwork sessions.

So first we need to get into the menu, to do this press Mode, scroll to Training, select (press Enter) Training Options and then select Alerts. Here you are faced with two options; Fast Pace Alert and Slow Pace Alert, this is very self explanatory but remember if you want to run within a prescribed range you should set both of them to create the pace window.


There are two ways to set them: based on your Garmin Training Center settings or Custom. The latter is easier on the fly and the GTC settings require that (a) you have entered all your pace ranges in and (b) you can remember them or have written down everything you entered. For this purpose I’ll focus on setting them on the fly.

With Fast Pace highlighted Press Enter and scroll to Custom Press Enter and the Alert Above becomes highlighted, Press Enter and a numerical drop down menu appears, select the pace you want, you’ll need to put either a “0” or press “>” to move to the second column. Once you have entered the required pace Select Done and press Enter, scroll to the Slow Pace Alert and repeat if required. Otherwise skip fast pace and just set only the Slow Pace, to do this just scroll down.

Once completed press Mode to back out of the menu till you get to the home screen and that’s it you’re all set. To turn them off go back to the Alerts menu and instead of selecting Custom simply select Off. Confused; click on the photos to make them bigger...yeah that means you have to actually come to my blog and get out of your reader! The alert itself is a series of chimes; not too loud but loud enough and different from the distance/lap alert if you have that set. I can usually hear them while wearing an iPod.

So there you go that was easy and now you have one less reason for avoiding that speedwork!