Competitive Jerks Racing and Training - 2023 (Read 497 times)

keen sounds like you have your sentenced figured out and the challenge will be dropping it on people who can comprehend fabricobble without questioning you.

One mark of greatness is my area is being able to say anything a person wants with enough confidence and smoothness that no one questions it. Not that I would ever do such a thing.

I had to look up AMOLED. I guess I shouldn't feel too bad about spending $250 on 200-mlle shoes, since I'm still rocking an 8-year-old Garmin 220. A bit more advanced than George's analog Timex, but not much. It really does everything I need; I don't use a HRM, and I don't want a watch that judges me. I do wish the battery life were a bit longer. It does get me through a marathon, but if I wanted to do 50k, it'd be iffy. Fortunately I don't.

One day I will get a better GPS watch. But it will need at least 30 hours of battery life. I use the Garmin 935 and it gets 18 hours if I am lucky.

 

My Fenix 6 apparently gets 25 hours with GPS on but I’ve never actually tested that out. The battery has held up pretty well over 3 years although it’s deteriorated a little… I used to be able to go a whole week without charging and now it’s maybe 5-6 days. The Fenix 7 is 50 hours plus in GPS mode.

TBH the Fenix 6 is a lot more watch than I actually need for running but I got it with credit card points and not real money. The screens on the Garmin watches have never been amazing so that new FR965 does look pretty cool.

Anyone have any experience with Coros apex 2? They say it can get 51 hours of GPS and is half the price ans fenix 7.

Then there is the Coros vertix 2 that says it will go 140 hours. Wow!!

 

My Fenix 6 apparently gets 25 hours with GPS on but I’ve never actually tested that out. The battery has held up pretty well over 3 years although it’s deteriorated a little… I used to be able to go a whole week without charging and now it’s maybe 5-6 days. The Fenix 7 is 50 hours plus in GPS mode.

 

TBH the Fenix 6 is a lot more watch than I actually need for running but I got it with credit card points and not real money. The screens on the Garmin watches have never been amazing so that new FR965 does look pretty cool.

 

 

 

What features do people actually use on these watches? It feels like a lot of these based on the video is a "oh, that's cool" and then you never use it again. Like the recovery stats: I feel like it's just a Strava flex of how hard you worked or how tired you are.

 

What I care about (not in order of priority)

-accurate GPS

-long battery life

-ability to sync with a foot pod (for my Runn Sensor on the treadmill) and a HR strap.

-run dynamics

-ability to set multiple alarms that go off throughout the day (e.g.,. a reminder at 2:15 pm to do something)

-waterproof

-swim mode with automatic lap/stroke detection

-ability to program complex workouts

-ability to program display screens

-ability to see watch face in dark

-comfort on wrist

-durability and good customer service

-ability to create new activities (I always have a special pool-running mode, separate running modes for outside and treadmill, and separate swimming modes for 50m and 25y, since I always forget to swap the distance)

-syncing the watch with a COMPUTER, not just a phone (I HATE the assumption that everyone has high powered phones that can handle a million apps that harvest their data for additional profit for the device manufacturer)

That's a lot, but there's umpteen functions in the newer high end watches that I don't need, so I can stick with a 2xx level watch and get everything I want.

The one thing I really wish Garmin did offer as an option - physical buttons on the watch face (like they were on the old 305, rather than to the side.  This is because in the winter it can be a real struggle to hit the watch buttons, even if I wear the watch over my top layer, in the winter my gloves/mittens will make it hard to punch the buttons, and I end up with a lot of track splits that are a second or two slower than what I actually ran.

Dave - I was just like you until a couple of months ago when I got hooked on city strides and started using the navigation feature. It immediately became obvious that the super low resolution leaves a lot to desire.
I don't care much about vertical oscillation or any of these other features.

Krash - Look up the Garmin Fenix 7X, it's got IMMENSE battery life:

GPS watches - I care about GPS accuracy, large AMOLED screen so my ancient eyes can actually see what's on the screen, long battery life (direct conflict with the first item LOL). I'd also like to be able to hail an Uber if things went bad during a run, like that time when a dog decided to prevent me from running, it would walk by my side quite, but if I tried running it would bark and come close to bite me.

me - Speaking of GPS watches, I've tweaked a configuration on my watch and now I can navigate courses much better. What I did was I went into the map settings and set the Details to Low. Previously I had set it to high thinking it would display a high quality map, but it turns out high detail means it adds a ton of useless stuff to the map, like points of interest etc, which clutter the map and I can see what matters.

Now the map is very clean, I can see only the streets, a purple line ahead indicating where I should go, a white arrow just a bit ahead to show where I'm going or turning, and a blue arrow indicating where it thinks I am.

One thing missing is if it would display the street name together with the turn commands, that would be helpful, except if you are in Germany, then you'd need a 6 inch screen to fit the names 🤡

Flavio - OK the one feature that would be nice is the navigation. Mainly because the routes for my running group are created on MapMyRun, and depending on the complexity of the route, the people who downloaded it onto their watch can be extremely valuable. 

Ancient eyes - oh yes. I’ve set up my second display with two fields instead of three, so the numbers are a bit bigger. It’s only lap distance and lap pace, and I use that for races. Because usually my strategy is to maintain goal pace for each mile, so those are the most important fields. But for a race that starts in the early morning darkness, when my vision is even worse, I still can’t read it too well.

Nokia comparison - to me Garmin is more like Apple and the IPhone. I can’t speak to he technology, I assume the other brands are just as good. But like iPhones, I’ve always had it, so I’m comfortable with how they work and the ecosystem. They’re still the industry standard, so anything 3rd party that needs to interact with a GPS watch will probably be designed to work with Garmin before anything else. Although so many people have Apple watches now, and that’s more the mass-market device.

1:36:58 !!!!!! And no stops at the porta potty

That's awesome congrats! Obviously the two are tied together - no bathroom stops equal faster times. Looking forward to your race report