We mentioned earlier in the week that we had a few good reasons for folks to stop by the Garmin booth at this weekend’s New York City Marathon expo. Ryan, Deena and Constantina will be signing autographs and talking to fans Saturday in the Asics and Garmin booths. These three amazing athletes were up against the world’s fastest marathoners this summer in Beijing, where Constantina of Romania came away with gold in the women’s competition. Another thing these Asics athletes have in common—they’ve all trained with the Garmin Forerunner 405. I’m counting on fellow blogger Jake—who’ll be at the Garmin booth and then running on Sunday—to find out what the pros like best about the 405. I have some hunches.

I think Ryan’s fav feature is the automatic wireless uploads. He goes for an easy 16-miler in the a.m., comes home and Forerunner automatically sends his workout to his computer before he hits the shower. He logs onto Garmin Connect, analyzes his data over breakfast, contemplates his next workout. What’s Deena dig? I’d say she goes for Forerunner’s innovative touch bezel that lets her touch, tap and slide to select features and change training screens on the fly.

Constantina’s a woman who certainly travels all over the world and runs in new locales a lot, so I think her top pick would be Forerunner’s “back to start” feature. Just one of the bonuses of a GPS-enabled trainer like the 405.

If you’ll be in NYC for the marathon and expo, be sure to stop by the Asics and Garmin booth (#332) to meet these athletes and talk to Jake, star of our Forerunner 405 training videos. Here’s when the athletes are scheduled to be on-hand tomorrow (Saturday): Deena, 11 a.m. - 12:15 p.m. Constantina, 1 - 2:15 p.m. Ryan, 3 - 4:15 p.m.

Though I won’t be there, I sent a few of my prized issues of Runner’s World with Jake in hopes he can get some autographs for me. Among the magazines are the September 2008 issue with the compelling cover story on Hall and an issue from 2006 with Deena gracing the cover as one of the Runner’s World “Heroes of Running”. I believe she’s the only runner to have achieved this distinction twice. Known as the record breaker among American distance runners, Deena had to drop out of the women’s marathon in Beijing after breaking something else—a metatarsal bone in her right foot. Ouch. Been there, done that. Same bone, other foot. In fact, today I happen to be wearing the t-shirt from the fateful race three years ago where an unknown stress fracture turned to a full fracture. The event was the Graveyard Run and the t-shirt design depicts the tread of a running shoe next to a skeletal foot with a tag that reads “Run In Peace”. It was a fun run and a beautiful setting in a historic cemetery … just took me six months to recover. Hope Deena’s break heals much faster!