World, meet Tommy. Tommy, meet world. A member of the New York Road Runners Club, Tommy Wong is using the Forerunner 305 and MotionBased.com (soon to be Garmin Connect) to train for his sixth New York City Marathon, which he'll run Nov. 4. Tommy is going to check in with us before and after the race, and this is how his story begins:

I didn't know much about the Forerunner 305 when I first entered the contest at the New York Road Runners Club. I have never used a GPS watch before so I didn't know what to expect. After using it the first month I was really surprised at the features and how accurate the watch could be as a training tool. Normally I am accustomed to training with a standard watch. My training course for the most part has been Central Park in NYC. I'm pretty familiar with the park so I can usually get a pretty accurate read on the distance. But how accurate? An added challenge is trying to stay consistent. A question facing anyone who has ever run a long run before is how do you keep your pace level throughout the run?

The Forerunner 305 has been pretty much a godsend in answering a lot of these problems. During my runs this month I have been able to stay consistent throughout the run. My goal has been to train at a 7:30 pace with the hope that toward marathon day I would be able to run a 7:00 - 7:15 pace. With the Forerunner 305 I have been able to comfortably train at a 7:30 pace. As I run, the watch tracks distance and pace every mile. This has been great as I never really knew how fast I would be going per mile, running the risk of being too far ahead of the pace or too slow behind the pace. Monitoring your training and tracking it using MotionBased.com and Garmin Training Center is an added bonus to the watch. You get more detailed data so that you can chart your progress. I have a bike tour in October so I hope to use many of the other features for that.

Here is a log of some of the key runs in September, with links to my MotionBased digest. It's been a great month of training for the NYC Marathon. It was hard training on the hot days, training through the long mileage, but it was worth it. I set a PR by about a minute on the last day of the month with a 2:08 18-miler. I think the goals for October will be to run lighter, but run with a focus on hills and speed work.

9/30/07 - NYRRC NYC Marathon Tune Up: 18 miles, 2:08:27

9/23/07 - NYRRC Queens Half Marathon: 13.1 miles, 1:36:41

9/15/07 - NYRRC Long Training Run: 20 miles, 2:33:11

9/8/07 - NYRRC Fitness Magazine 4 Miler: 4 miles, 27:20

9/1/07 - Personal Training Run: 20 miles, 2:29:49