Garmin: Which watch fits fitness fans?

 

Every give-a-Garmin season, I hear a chorus of questions from friends and family seeking insider shopping tips. This week, I heard from Kathy, who heads up our local Girls on the Run council. She wanted to know what to get hubby Mark, who keeps his fitness in check with daily walks and wants to log every mile and minute. I had two picks: the sleek and stylish Forerunner 210, which tracks distance, time, pace and calories and comes with or without heart rate. For upcoming “snow days” when he can’t get outside, he canpair the 210 with the optional foot pod to track distance indoors.

My second pick is another wrist-worn wonder: the Approach S1 golf watch. I know Mark loves his time on the greens, and since Approach S1 is GPS-enabled, it could double as his distance tracker on and off the course. For golfing, it measures distance to the front, back and middle of greens for more than 17,000 preloaded courses.

I’m also recommending the newest Forerunner 210 with teal accents for a friend and for my sister. They’ve both been very good girls this year and get to check off “half marathon” from their 2011 resolution list. I like the Forerunner 210 for them because it’s super easy to use, gives accurate distance and pace data and it looks good/feels good. And for runners who want a little more, it offers customized interval sessions to guide their speedwork.

Google Earth: “The Immortal Game”

 

1851 was the year of the Great Exhibition in London (England not Ontario). The chess community marked the event by staging the first international chess tournament which brought in the best players of Europe.

An exciting game played during the event became tagged ‘The Immortal Game’. The opponents were Adolf Anderssen, the eventual winner of the tournament, and Lionel Kieseritsky. If Pyrrhus, son of Achilles, had not already given his name to a type of battle in which victory was gained despite incurring heavy losses, then we might today have used the name of Anderssen with the same meaning, for he sacrificed many pieces to get one bishop and two knights into a winning position.

 

chess.jpg 

Anderssen was much the more aggressive player but the rate of attrition was high. He lost a pawn early on when his King’s Gambit was accepted. Then a bishop fell, and another pawn, then both castles. Finally, he forced checkmate by sacrificing his queen even while Kieseritsky thought he was doing well to have Anderssen’s king on the run as his queen and a bishop controlled row 1 of the board.

So, why the animation in Google Earth? Colin said:

“I imagined the game as a battle between two armies, that’s easy enough to do, but I also wanted to tell a story. As well as being fun to create, the animation is intended to illustrate not only the chess game but also a story in which an embedded reporter watches the raging battle and the bloodshed all around from the position of the King’s Pawn. I’ve written a short story which now forms the bones of a longer novel.

It took a while to find the right place on Earth to set the battle. I needed high ground as defensive positions for Kieseritsky and a landscape that would match the story. I found this in the mountains and valleys of the English Lake District, one of my favourite places and destination of many camping trips.

I created the chess pieces using Google SketchUp and that was a fun exercise in itself. I exported the pieces from SketchUp as 3D models which I could then place and animate in Google Earth. The latest version uses the gx:Tour features of KML; previously I had animated the game using set positions after each move, but that doesn’t flow so well. I’m pleased with the way the pieces now glide over the ground.”

You can view it yourself in Google Earth by using this KML file.