Heads up! The big Garmin annual spring sale has started, with $200 off the Fenix 8 (first sale to date!), $100 off the Edge 1050, Forerunner 965 at $499, the Forerunner 265, the new Instinct 3, and countless other Garmin products including inReach Mini 2. Plus the Apple Watch Ultra 2 Black Titanium is on sale, and some Suunto & Wahoo product deals too. Full list & thoughts here!
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In Depth Product Reviews
You probably stumbled upon here looking for a review of a sports gadget. If you’re trying to decide which unit to buy – check out my in-depth reviews section. Some reviews are over 60 pages long when printed out, with hundreds of photos! I aim to leave no stone unturned.
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Read My Sports Gadget Recommendations.
Here’s my most recent GPS watch guide here, and cycling GPS computers here. Plus there are smart trainers here, all in these guides cover almost every category of sports gadgets out there. Looking for the equipment I use day-to-day? I also just put together my complete ‘Gear I Use’ equipment list, from swim to bike to run and everything in between (plus a few extra things). And to compliment that, here’s The Girl’s (my wife’s) list. Enjoy, and thanks for stopping by!
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My Photography Gear: The Cameras/Drones/Action Cams I Use Daily
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The Swim/Bike/Run Gear I Use List
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It would be nice to be able to show only one big data field in the middle, that would be nice!
Custom track lengths 200m – 400m sounds interesting to me. It gives an extra point to Suunto for my next watch.
Track mode isn’t that useful.
I train oon a track at my athletics club and we do high intensity intervals. Distance is easy on a track and I know what times I have to run the intervals in. All I need is a stopwatch.
I had track mode on my previous watch, a forerunner 965. Tried it once, never used it again. I don’t think anyone in my club uses track mode.
Maybe only interesting for people who are obsessed how their trail looks on strava.
But hé, produces need new features to sell, users want new things and reviewers need new features to fill their blogs. So, everybody is happy.
As always, Leo, just because you don’t find something useful, doesn’t mean most others don’t. Not sure why you get so upset about sports tech moving forward, yet keep reading various sites about sports tech. Those two seem at odds.
Track mode is useful not just for the person on the track, but actually for the coach, since they can now know whether or not the athlete actually did the pacing correctly. Previously, that was mostly impossible since the distance would be too inconsistent. Likewise, for athletes looking back at their own performances, the distance/pacing was also too inconsistent.
Again, there’s reasons why everyone else is pretty darn happy with it, even if you never use it.
People have different opinions.
My trainers never look at pace. They only look at time for an interval.
And I know quite a lot of people value feature quantity over quality. More is.. well more
I’n not that keen on getting 500, 600, 700+ euro sportwatches just because loads of (useless) functions are added
And honestly, I am not keen to read your negative comments on a website that celebrates sports watches and their versatility.
It‘s the same as someone running into a vegetarian restaurant with a bunch of steaks and shouting at the guests that they are all a bunch of sad losers.
If you thing, 500+ euro watches are useless, just don‘t bother visiting a site catering to these watches and stay in „your“ circle where trainers seem convinced that proper pacing is not important. Funny that anyone with a professional background in running will tell you just the opposite …
I train on a track where athletes just below dutch elete train. Coaches shout times for interval’s. Not pace.
It’s not like you do a 15k endurance run on a track.
I agree wholeheartedly and I really also like my veggies and the DCR site …!
The Big Lebowski would have a great quote for you here: “you’re not wrong, Leo, you’re just…”
I do multiple workout a week on the track and also don’t find track modes useful for the same reasons you say, but I also get why others would find it useful.
When I train with the club, the track mode is pretty useless I agree with you, but if I’m on my own, it can be helpful.
And I’m the first one to advise people not to use the smartwach pace on the track.
Dutch elite, you say. Perhaps they ought to have a listen to what Ray is saying too…
link to en.m.wikipedia.org
(Zero running medals)
…depends if the coach handles men or women. While the men were empty handed, the women did exceptionally well. Wikipedia’s summary at the top appears to have entirely forgotten the running category altogether, regardless of the women’s many medals.
I guess I get the point. For decades car makers have been tending to make a function being useful for lots of people available only if you buy it as part of an extra package, so either you sacrifice this function or you buy this function practically for a huge amount.
The basic products are designed in a way that you will miss something, but certainly you cannot add a function, it is not like a pizza with toppings of your choice.
I can see both sides of this debate:
– Track mode is def useless for a certain type of coach when it comes to group workouts. In general, these coaches look at your time and not your pace/distance (because they know both can be off) – this is typically the case for running on a track or other places that might be used for group workouts (hills, cemetery, roads on a quiet subdivision). I do realize this kind of presupposes that (lap) pace/distance will be wrong in the first place, which is the problem the track mode is meant to solve. However, I don’t think track mode solves the problem where instant pace is unreliable, which is one of the reasons coaches tell runners not to constantly look at their watch during intervals.
– Track mode is kinda cool in theory if you want your GPS track to look nice in Strava, as you say, as well as making your distance and pace stats look correct after the fact
Obviously some users want track mode, since Apple, Garmin, and other vendors have all added the feature.
“Track mode is useful not just for the person on the track, but actually for the coach, since they can now know whether or not the athlete actually did the pacing correctly. Previously, that was mostly impossible since the distance would be too inconsistent. Likewise, for athletes looking back at their own performances, the distance/pacing was also too inconsistent.”
I mean, it does make things easier for both runners and coaches after the fact, but if the distance is known, then it’s easy to use a standalone pace calculator to figure out the actual pace (or in some cases, to do it in your head). Yeah, I get the point of technology is to make this stuff dead simple. But again, not all intervals are run on tracks, so in the case of non-track intervals, coaches will still need some kind of strategy to address the fact that the recorded distance/pace is not necessarily the same as the actual distance/pace. And the same strat can be used to handle track workouts.
I will say that I know some fairly fast runners who don’t even take manual laps (or use structured workouts) when they run intervals, meaning their activity (which typically includes warmup and cooldown) only uses 1k auto laps, and any information about the time, distance and speed of their actual intervals is pretty much lost forever. (Yeah, *technically* they could reconstruct their intervals by using some obscure and user-unfriendly 3rd party site which allows chopping up their activity into manual laps after the fact, but obviously they’re not gonna do that if they couldn’t be bothered to simply press the LAP button manually in the first place.)
They just run by feel and try to keep up with people in their pace group. (This includes 20-somethings, in case anyone wants to make some argument that it’s only technophobic people who would do this.) Their coach just uses an big digital stopwatch to check their time at the end of each interval. (To get around the distance problem outside of a track, the start and end points for each interval are mapped out before the workout. Ofc one could argue that the distance will still be wrong using this scheme, but nothing’s perfect.)
To be clear I love tech and cool features, but I can see why some people wouldn’t be super excited about track mode, especially seeing how my running peers actually use their Garmins for interval workouts.
To be clear, I run with people who range from roughly 2:40 to 3:50 for the marathon. Nowhere near elite or even sub-elite, but most of them are fairly competitive compared to the average runner who runs for likes.
I’d say the less elite you are, the closer you’d be to Garmin’s typical customer, anyway.
I do know a handful of guys who can run a 2:30 marathon or who can win a 5 miler, and they don’t really care about track mode either.
But I’m sure it’s useful (or cool) for some people
> When I train with the club, the track mode is pretty useless I agree with you, but if I’m on my own, it can be helpful.
Yeah, I’d say the same for programmed workouts (although some people do use them for group workouts anyway). One of the problems is that if your rest is based on time, you may not rest for the exact prescribed time since you’re supposed to go with your pace group (so you may end up resting a few seconds longer or shorter than you were supposed to.)
I think programmed workouts and track mode are both features that sound great in theory, but aren’t always useful in practice (at least not in every situation)
> And I’m the first one to advise people not to use the smartwach pace on the track.
Yep. Track mode does not help with the issue of instance pace being unreliable
> Track mode does not help with the issue of instance pace being unreliable
Sorry, *instant* pace
I’ve seen, heard, read about, and worked with quite a few coaches, and coached some people myself -some of whom brought me to different countries, from Norway up to Kenia. Whether or not you like €500+ sports watches is irrelevant here. They’re just tools – tools you can use to monitor, coach, understand, and guide an athlete. I know coaches who can train you better with just a stopwatch and a chalkboard than with the supposed “must-have” of wearing a Fenix 8 on your wrist. No matter how you look at it, Garmin (and all the others) are profit-driven companies. They didn’t invent training science—people did, with or without tools. In my experience, people with a professional background look far beyond the metrics a company happens to provide. The only thing I don’t like about this is that company marketing higher end watches as “better”. They are not better. In what exactly? As long as you believe in an algorithm, let’s say body battery, fine. If that makes you move, perfect. And the more you pay, the more you likely will believe the metric. Basic psychology, or marketing…that’s kinda the same these days …
I think this conversation has gone off the rails here.
Track mode isn’t some special metric. It’s literally just time/distance/pace (and a pretty GPS track). It’s very fundamental stuff for running coaches that aren’t standing by the track itself (because even most elite athletes don’t have coaches with them every day, these days, they’re mostly remote).
I get what track mode is. It adjusts the GPS track and the recorded distance/pace to match the distance that was nominally run on a physical track, which is cool, but I don’t think it’s *essential*.
My point is that if you run on a track and you take a manual lap every 400m (which is easy to do based the track markings *), then even if the watch doesn’t record exactly 400m:
– the time is still correct (track mode doesn’t affect the recorded time, correct?)
– the distance is known (400m) even if it was recorded slightly differently (e.g. 396m)
– if the recorded distance is wrong, then the pace will be wrong ofc, but again it’s easy to figure out the correct pace using a pace calculator app/website, excel/numbers/google sheets, or your brain
– if you’re running 400m laps (or 200/800/1600), your coach (and you) probably already know the *time* you’re aiming for on each lap anyway. I’m not saying pace is irrelevant, but time is often just as good in this case
[*] ofc one of the purposes of running on a track in the first place is that it’s very easy to ensure you run the correct distance (as a multiple of 400m).
As long as you take manual laps at the correct distance for each lap (400m), then you can be sure that the time for each lap is correct, and once you know the time and distance, the pace can be calculated if necessary.
Yes at this point you’re basically using your Garmin as a stopwatch, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that imo. Your watch still records other valuable metrics such as HR and cadence.
So all you have to do is tell your coach “I took a manual lap every 400m, just ignore the fact that the distance recorded by my Garmin for each lap may be different”. This might not even be necessary – it might be obvious from the fact that all your work intervals are close to 400m, or from the fact that the coach knows you were supposed to an 8 x 400m workout (for example).
My point is that we all know GPS distance is imprecise, and this fact comes up even when doing interval workouts which are not on a track. There are ways around this for both track-based and non-track-based workouts which don’t require the use of track mode.
I get that track mode makes things nicer tho. I’m not opposed to the feature at all, I just agree with ppl who say it’s not essential and/or that they don’t use it for interval workouts.
I like running with a Garmin for many reasons, but I’m not gonna pretend I think every single feature is indispensable, even those which are marketed as game changers.
– if you’re running 400m laps (or 200/800/1600), your coach (and you) probably already know the *time* you’re aiming for on each lap anyway.
Sorry I should probably have said “if you’re running 400m *intervals* (or 200/800/1600)”, to avoid conflating the interval length with the length of a 400m track “lap”.
> I know coaches who can train you better with just a stopwatch
I saw one anecdote of an elite marathoner who would normally run races with just a timex. He switched to a GPS watch (probably Garmin) for one race, but subsequently switched back to using a timex, because the imprecise distance/pace reported by the GPS watch messed up his pacing. Ofc he could’ve just used his Garmin as a glorified stopwatch, but that would kinda defeat the purpose, right?
And yeah, I knew an elite runner who preferred running with a Timex (this was 10 years ago tho).
It’s funny that Track Mode and Auto Lap by Timing Gate are pretty much tech solutions to resolve a problem caused by using sports watch tech in the first place. Same with the Race Screen app.
I have been playing with the new live track app. A couple interesting things here. 1. it was developed by a 3rd party so it does look like some are interested in developing for the Suunto app store and this could be interesting if more were interested in the SDK and 2. it is really nice to have a map on your phone that is attached to where you are in your watch. I know others already do this, but Suunto is working on catching up and doing it with style.
I’m happy to see all of those advancements coming to my Suunto Race S! What I find odd is that the watch installed it tonight even I have automatic updates disabled 🙁
I had switched it off when Suunto broke the HR/Sleeptracking with an update…
I wish for a track bike mode for bike computers or watches, accurate distance there is as yet not really possible.
The open race track in Zürich is 333.3 m and not 329/340/310/…
I know that’s not the biggest of markets but would make some people _very_ happy 😊
Bummed they didn’t include a music mode like the Run as that would make it a really compelling option then. Yes I know it’s MP3 only, but it’s nice to leave my phone at home, especially on speed workout days and whatnot.
From what I have read on the Suunto forums it does not look like that will be coming to the Vertical/Race/Race S anytime soon. Time will tell. I guess snuggle with your Garmin until then. I think 9/10 Coros/Suunto comments are about music and people having after thoughts about their purchase.
Have you tested that suunto automatic heart rate zone thingie? do they really align with aerobic and anaerobic thresholds?
And here I was hoping that they change the sensor limit…
I haven’t used Track Mode a lot on my Garmin, but only because I don’t run tracks very often (almost never). But when I do, I use it. I just like the fact, that the intervals are as spot on as it can get. I don’t need to have someone shouting numbers to me, I can see them and know, that they are correct. Nor do I need a stopwatch or whatever. I just choose Track Mode, press start and can concentrate on running.
Oh, and the GPS-Track is nice too, which helps my inner Monk.
Having said that: glad that now almost all of the important players have this mode. The more feature equality, the easier to switch brands without loosing certain features (yeah, not all features are equally important for everyone. That’s not the point). This in turn forces the other companies to be more competitive to keep their customers (pricing, features, etc.) to stay with them.
So, while this seems a “trivial” thing, in the long run it’s a good thing for consumers overall, when companies implement as many features as they can (of course, as long as the quality of said feature is equally good too).
Hi,
What is the purpose of this GNSS improvement ?
GNSS optimization happens over wireless network automatically every night
Thanks
By preloading (download over wifi) satellite positions you can achieve a much shorter time to first fix (TTFF) when starting an activity. I assume it also improves error correction and accuracy.
If they could only add music in the same way Garmin does. Ie. Syncing with playlists, then they could convert from the ever more expensive Garmins.
I love my Garmin devices, but the pricing is becoming increasingly unsustainable for me. I just fear, that I’m too deep in their ecosystem to switch. But if Polar will ever bring a true Fenix competitor as well as Running Dynamics, I might be tempted to go back to them after 10 years of Garmin (pity Polar hasn’t continued their bike devices, though …)