Garmin

Yesterday the Garmin Forerunner 570 crashed mid-workout while doing MAS intervals at a critical moment. It crashed while I was running at 4:35 per kilometre so I couldn’t reboot the watch with ease and re-start the workout.

I had to stop, type in the code, re-start the workout, and then start running again. This glitch teaches us two things. The first is that beta versions of Garmin software do, sometimes, crash, and the second, is that having a backup watch is always worthwhile.

The Garmin Instinct Solar is an excellent watch if you like to hike and walk, but falls short if you want more detailed stats when you’re running. It doesn’t have HRV monitoring, fatigue and other features.

Years ago, when I was in Spain I was playing with the watch. I would leave it in the Spanish sun for hours at a time, making sure that the solar panel was facing the sun. I also used a solar panel to charge the watch with solar energy via the charging cable.

Recently someone said that the Apple watch is seamlessly integrated and easy to use. I never considered its simplicity of use because I grew up playing with GPS devices from the etrex 32 to the Nokia N95 8GB to several dozen watches and devices over the decades. As a result the difficulty of Garmin, Suunto and other platforms is normalised.

I did switch back to the Suunto Run watch on Monday or Sunday and I was surprised to see that I had not started the device properly. I noticed the same with the Coros Nomad a day or two later.

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.