First Long Run with NEW Garmin!

My 9+ year old Garmin died back in September, and I trained with just a stopwatch for the TC 10 Mile and the Moustache Run Half Marathon in October and November. But I just got a new Garmin for Christmas:

Fenix 6S Pro (pic from Amazon)

I used it last week on 2 treadmill runs, and it was CLOSE to accurate for total distance, which was pretty amazing to me: it started getting a little ahead, had registered around 1.55 miles when I the treadmill told me I was at 1.50, but then it started coming back down so it was only 0.03 off after 5.5 miles (it told me I had gone 5.53 when my treadmill said 5.50).

I also wore it to bed one night so far because my wife was curious how low my heart rate got at night - she's heard it get quite low, and apparently I averaged around 46 bpm all night.

I DON'T like how much stuff it can do, and we looked around for a while when looking for models before Christmas because I don't need it to do everything! Ideally, it just needs to record distance. Really. I didn't set this up in any specific way, but it sent me an alert when my wife texted and when I got a tweet during my first run, and I hated that. I don't need those distractions and hate being constantly "connected." I need to look into it and turn those functions off.

So I used it on 2 "easy" runs last week, but yesterday I tried it on my first long run. I went 11.2 miles in 1:17:04 with the middle 6 miles in 37:41 (6:16.8/mile pace). And again, even though it was a treadmill run, the distances were PRETTY close (for it just being based on using an accelerometer). Here's my overall pace chart:

2.5 mile WU, 6 miles slowly getting faster, 2.5+ mile CD.

I think all those little dips are me wiping sweat off my face - I tried to do that with my non-Garmin arm, but it still registered as a slow-down (even though I didn't touch the speed).

Here's my heart rate climbing through that effort:

186 max.


I don't use heart rate, so I don't know what to take away from this.

One thing that IS nice is that I track my footstrikes a few times during most runs (just by counting them over 60 seconds) as I USED to "thump" too much around 160 strides/minute and now I've gotten better at keeping them around 180. And here were my footsrikes throughout the run:

I've had PTs tell me my form is better when I'm running faster, and this
shows that too! The best strike-rates around 180 are all in the faster miles.

So I was still talking "manual" laps because I didn't fully trust it indoors on the treadmill yet. And I'm glad I did: it logged "warm up" and "cool down" 1/2 miles as a bit long, and my faster "pace" miles in the middle as a bit short:

Note the distances: they were all a perfect 0.50 on my treadmill,
but I only had 2 out of 22 splits register that way on the Garmin.

Overall, my 2.5 mile WU was 0.09 miles TOO FAR.

My 6.0 pace miles were 0.14 miles TOO SHORT.

And my 2.7 mile CD was again 0.14 miles TOO FAR.

Oh, and another random thing I don't care for that much is the screen is pretty dark. Here's a photo during my leg exercises yesterday afternoon comparing my normal watch with the Fenix 6S Pro:

During that lower body workout, I tried the "strength" setting to track my time, but being they are weirder exercises, it didn't get any of them right. The first sets were CLOSE to being a squat, but I did 90 reps, not 15:

(Also, after each exercise when you hit a button to note that your reps are over, it allows you to correct the number of reps, but I would NEVER slow up THAT MUCH to keep hitting buttons on my Garmin to correct every set. I feel like I'd be doing that way more than lifting weights.)

Heart rate for my lower body workout. Yes, I do all the harder moves at the start.

Overall, the new Garmin is great! It just does more than it needs to, so I need to turn off some of those functions. And I need to find a main screen option that shows the seconds as well, as I use that a lot (there are many options to download for a main screen as I've heard, but I haven't done it yet - mine currently looks like the first photo in this post from Amazon). I like having some of the extra info, but I still think I'll be going back to my normal Timex watch for daily wear shortly, putting on the watch for runs and maybe some trainer rides.