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Week in Review – May 31st, 2025

The Week in Review is a collection of both all the goodness I’ve written during the past week around the internet, as well as a small pile of links I found interesting – generally endurance sports related. I’ve often wondered what to do with all of the coolness that people write, and while I share a lot of it on Twitter/X and BlueSky, this is a better forum for sending it on to y’all. Most times these different streams don’t overlap, so be on the lookout at all these places for good stuff!

So with that, let’s get into the action!

DCR Posts In The Past Week:

Here are all the latest posts on the site:

Sunday: FIT File: Whoop Did It Again (The Whoop 5.0 Backlash)

Tuesday: The Garmin Forerunner 970 Complete Beginners Guide

Thursday: Komoot Team Says Goodbye

…hang tight, next week’s gonna be a busy one! For that matter, June is gonna be arguably the busiest June in as long as I can remember.

Sports Tech Deals:

We’re in the midst of the spring sports tech sale. Some of these end this weekend, some of these end closer to the US Father’s Day. And some of them, who knows when they end. Either way, there are some fantastic deals in here, especially if you were looking at a Fenix 8.

Here’s the wearable stuffs:

There are no deals currently.

The cycling goods:

There are no deals currently.

And everything else:

There are no deals currently.

Got all that? Good. Enjoy!

YouTube Videos This Week:

Here’s what hit the tubes over on the You of Tube, definitely don’t forget to subscribe there to get notified of videos the second they hit!

Stuff I Found Interesting Around The Interwebs:

Here’s a not-so-small smattering of all the random things that I stumbled on while doing my civic duty to find the end of the Internet:

1) Apple reportedly to re-number operating systems, including WatchOS: This actually makes a ton of sense. Especially for platforms that are updated annually (without fail), just makes it a heck of a lot easier to keep track of things. And in the case of watches, it should reduce confusion a bit. Because up till now, the Apple Watch #’s have been offset 1 digit from WatchOS #’s. Meaning, Apple Watch Series 10 came out with WatchOS 11. In any event, I’ll be there in person next week to dive into any name changes, and more importantly, the actual WatchOS changes.

2) Garmin May 2025 Quarterly Software Update: In case you’ve been ignoring the e-mails Garmin sent you over the past week, they added a slate of new features to mostly newish watches, including Rucking, Breathing Variations, pin passcode, and more. Most of these features have launched on other watches in recent months, and are now available to a wider range of watches.

3) The anatomy of a record-setting 24-hour virtual ride: This was FAR more detailed than I had expected.

4) Polar expands subscription Fitness Program to iOS & US/UK: This was their expanded paid service that was announced a bit ago, and was previously only EU and Android. Now it’s iOS/Android, and available in EU countries, Norway, and the UK.

5) Strava acquires The Breakaway app: This app has personalized/customized plans for users, roughly in the same way that running app, Runna has, which Strava acquired a few months back as well. I do find it notable that The Breakaway is founded by Jordan Kobert, a former Strava employee from a decade ago.

6) Zwift Splits/Lap Feature Rolls Out: While previously outlined at Zwift Community Live, this feature is now live, allowing you to take/create splits.

7) Google Pixel 9 phones can now use GoPro cameras as camera source: Somehow I totally missed this (and seemingly, so did most of the internet). You can now select a GoPro as a camera source (secondary camera), sorta like how you’d do so for a webcam in Zoom. That’s pretty cool/interesting. I’d love to have that capability on iOS as well.

With that – thanks for reading!

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9 Comments

  1. David

    Just curious thoughts about what might happen first, Garmin releases an Enduro for smaller wrists, or Suunto releases a new Vertical with their updated on wrist heart rate sensor? I’ve narrowed down my search to these wishlist items. 😀

    Thanks!

    • That’s a tricky question. Frankly, I have no idea. I feel like Garmin thinks/believes there isn’t a market for smaller sized MIP based displays in the ultra segment (beyond Instinct series). I think there’s probably some truth to that, in terms of the market size Garmin now needs to justify making a product.

      If we look at UTMB finishers (for the full-length one, the one that would justify the battery needs), only 12% were women in 2023 (first stat I found). And of course, some portion of those will be fine with medium sized MIP units (and inversely, some portion of men will prefer smaller units).

      Whereas Suunto has a bit more flexibility on what it takes to ‘make it worth it’ for them (even moreso applied to COROS too). Of course, as always, Garmin *hates* the idea of someone stealing their lunch. So eventually, if the demand is there, Garmin will make a smaller unit with those features. But it make take an iteration or two. I’d say it’d be interesting to see in a Fenix 9 (or whatever it’s called), if they bring back the smaller Fenix S sized MIP unit or not, which they ditched for Fenix 8. If not, then I’d argue that fate is sealed.

  2. Pavel Vishniakov

    Where can you see breathing variations? My Forerunner was updated to include them a while ago but for the life of me I can’t figure out where is this data located.

    • It’ll show up in two places:

      1) In Garmin Connect , under the same page as sleep stats (look at left side).
      2) On the watch, within the sleep stats section for last night, akin to things like sleep phases/stages

      Note that it does require PulseOx be enabled (during sleep), otherwise it won’t show up.

    • Gin C

      Is it rolling out in stages? I have it now on my 265S and I got the email noting it is also rolling to the 255 and Venu3.

      My husband hasn’t gotten the notices I did (has pulse ox on already) and neither of use sees a way to display the info in connect. Don’t want to bother my Dad about it if it’s not 100% up and running.

    • Pavel Vishniakov

      Looking at Garmin Forums (and my own 955 Solar) it seems that, despite the Breathing Variations being present in beta changelogs and in press materials on the update, they actually weren’t rolled out to 955.

  3. Thanks for acknowledging my Escape Collective story documenting Matthew Lefthand’s record-breaking 24-hour virtual ride. He is an amazing athlete who’s primed and ready to rewrite the ultra-cycling record books.

  4. SummitAK

    Hey Ray, do you have any plans to drill down into Gamin’s May 7, 2025 sunsetting of cycling maps on their Edge devices? My first reaction is that this is another Garmin shift to subscription revenue. As typical with Garmin, the details are confusing and the impacts probably won’t be clear for a while. They have something similar going on with watch mapping as well.

    Their previous service approach really made travel navigation easy. Now it may mean going back to openstreetmap and similar. This is a PITA and probably kills off a lot of the newer Edge mapping associated options, such as POI, visible segments, etc.

    • While I think their communications are confusing AF (kinda the norm), on this particular item, best I can tell, this is a non-issue. Or at least a non-issue for anyone with the last two generations of Edge devices.

      Essentially, the “Garmin Cycle Map” was a specific branded product name, that for a long-long time, you had to buy (or download the free OSM maps). Then, starting with the Edge 530/830/1030 series in 2019, Garmin started including those maps free of charge.

      Following that in the Edge x40 series, the maps are still free, but now transitioned to Garmin’s “TopoActive” series, that includes basically more data in them (namely, topographic details). Still, naming and extra bits side, it was still free to Edge users. These maps were also made available to the x30 series.

      Roughly speaking, this same transitioned happened on the wearables, though I’d have to dig back further to see exactly when they transitioend to the TopoActive maps. I feel like that was a long-long time ago.

      At the end of the day, nobody has lost maps. They’re all still there, free as they were before. Just now fully consolidated under TopoActive that you’d have likely been using anyways for many years.

      TLDR: This is just crappily worded statement from Garmin, introducing confusion, and then a bit of internet clickbait out there made it worse.