Friday, January 23, 2009

How I got my Garmin Forerunner for 17 dollars

OK so I have been salivating of late since the Garmins have been down to a alltime low of $159 (from 200's) atAmazon.com. Its funny but seeing that made me start thinking that I NEED ONE.

The truth is I was really wanting one since last years self supported marathon where I discovered that my footpod although calibrated was still off by about 10 percent. In it over estimated the distance coverred by 10 percentwhich over a mile distance is no biggy, but it adds up over a marathon. AT the haflfway point of the run, my Polr was sayin I had run close to 15 miles when I knew it was 13 becaue I had mapped the course out on mapmyrun, and also Phils Garmin said 13.

So you may be wondering whats the big deal? It m,eans my 18 mile runs were actually closer to 16 miles. It means I undertrained, when I thought I was doing the correct distance. I have since corrected it by calibrating it so that the distances are short by about 2-3 percent, so it works out. But since then I had Garmin envy.

So this new low price is being flaunted in my face, but right in the middle of a budget crunch.

What to do, what to do.

Well I happen to have alot of frequent flyer points laying around in allot of different programs. In each just enough to look good but not enough to actually get a free flight from them.

So I remembered I website Points.com I had signed up with a few months back. It was suppossed to be a place to swap out points from one FF plan to another. But when I checked it out before there really was not much.

However they have evolved a bit. Now they have a rrangements with these plans to exchange points for services and gift cards. And guess who is one of teh vendors they are working with....AMAZON!
BINGO!!

I was able to convert my points from 6 different programs into $250 of amazon gift certificates!

Amazon set them to me by email, and I ended up getting the Garmin, the Garmin bike mount, cadence sensor as well as a couple of books and gifts for my Honey( must make sure not to look tooo selfish ;). Fortunatly she has a wishlist on Amazon ;)

I ended up having to pay 17 dollars for shipping charges for stuff that came from independant shops selling through Amazon.

Beautiful.

5 comments:

ramster said...

nice! which garmin did you get?

i need to check out that points.com site too :)

Ski Dad said...

Forerunner 305

Philip LaVoie said...

to quote eric cartman, "sweeeeeet".

Anonymous said...

Also, Costco, through Feb 8, has the Forerunner 50 bundle (watch, HR monitor, foot pod, and USB wireless dongle) for $80... I got mine a few weeks ago and like it, although the maps in the PC software are woefully out of date (even though they say 2008).

After calibrating the foot pod on a local high school track, it seems more than accurate enough for my training needs.

Ski Dad said...

For running a footpod is plenty, my benefit from a GPS unit is that I can use it on the Bike as well for speed information, so I have one device to work with instead of 2.