Garmin

Around two months ago I decided to see if a Garmin mid range device would cure my desire to upgrade and try new devices so I went for the Garmin Forerunner 570. In many ways it didn’t deliver drastically more than the Garmin Instinct 2. I noticed that it was just as bad at sleep tracking. The key issue though, is that after a swim, and a ride one day I noticed that a plastic o-ring seemed to have made it’s way between the glass and the watch body.

A few days ago I think I ran and then swam. While waiting for lunch I noticed that the Garmin Forerunner 570 had a bit of plastic sticking out of it so I pulled on it, to see if it came loose. It didn’t. It stayed put. It appeared to come from between the case, and the screen. I suspect that it is part of the o-ring or adhesive mateerial that keeps the screen attached to the body of the watch that came loose.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of looking at expensive Garmin watches and thinking that maps are a premium feature, when, in fact they are not. Suunto and Coros offer them on affordable devices, should you require that feature for trail running, hiking, and more.

If you want to use the Coros Nomad for navigation while cycling then it’s bad. I tested it when cycling from Morges to Cossonay a few weeks ago. The problem is that it tells you “straight ahead” or turn left, but not in a cycling/driving context, so it’s unreliable for that.

Recently Strava added MCP AI decorations, with the idea of making workout feedback more interesting and dynamic. In practice when Garmin Suunto and Runna did that they forgot a key aspect. Allowing humans to add real context.

AI is a guessing algorithm, not true intelligence. It will look at data, but it won’t understand it. It will only correlate it to other data and provide a guess according to other contextual information.

Over the last week or two I tested the Garmin ForeRunner 570 when navigating from Crans-Montana to Leukerbad. I also tried a group run navigating with the 570 during a Décathlon run, before spotting that the Coros Nomad and Coros Apex 4 offered full map navigation without paying the Garmin premium price.

Hiking with the 570 is a red line on a black line. You look at the squiggle and intuit where you’re meant to go. With hiking it worked most of the time, although in one or two situations context would have been nice to have. In the second I was running with a group as unofficial navigator. I had the red line helping me intuit where the track was and I got it right.

Yesterday I woke up feeling tired and both Garmin and Apple said that I neded to rest. What I thought were allergies turned out to be a one day cold, I hope. According to the Apple Watch my HRV crashed down and in the evening I definitely had a cold/flu dream.

My dream, paradoxically, was sorting through a list of photos via checksum or some other technology. What I spent my waking hours doing made it into my dreams.

I like Garmin Connect and the Garmin Instinct 2. Both the app, and the device are good and they’re reliable for tracking sports on a daily basis. Having said this, I felt the urge to slide back to my Suunto devices and the Suunto app. For many, many, many years I was very happy with suunto getting two dive computers, one feature watch an ambit 2, ambit 3, Suunto Spartan and Peak 5.

The Garmin Connect End of year summary is currently available, and updating daily. The stats are quite interesting,

Despite cycling as much as I did Garmin says that I took 3.8 million steps this year and that in March I took 486,000 steps. That’s when I was hiking a lot.

Activities

I logged 457 activities, of which 233 walking, 154 cycling and 36 running. I logged 741h and 58 minutes of sports. According to the app I travelled 8919km which is cycling to Paris from London 18 times. The biggest bike ride was 148 kilometres and the month where I travelled furthest was 1691.8km.

Garmin connect isn’t as smart as I thought. I thought that if I used the Explore 2 with a heart rate belt, that I would get training status and training readiness. For a week I was tracking with the Explore 2 as my primary tracker. Data is missing.

It’s a shame that it doesn’t work as expected because if I could wear a normal watch while cycling, rather than the instinct 2, then I would avoid tracking the same workout twice.

There was a time, for decades, if not centuries, when a watch provided us with the time. We would wear it in a pocket, attached to a chain, we would stare up at a clock tower and we would see the time. We might even hear church bells to indicate every quarter, half and full hour. In the last decade we have gone from wearing watches to tell time, to watches that quantify us.