Tips for Garmin workouts

One of the reasons I first bought a Garmin was for the ability to pre-programme sessions from the app, sending these to my watch ready for the next run. It’s a big selling point as it can mean you don’t need to remember the various paces, it tells you when to increase or decrease speed based on the plan, and when your cool down has finally begun.

It’s a very well-designed feature, and as free software goes, Garmin Connect overall is pretty impressive. You have the choice of adding “repeats” of work and rest periods to save you time when creating the workout, you can set target paces with alarms if you go too fast or too slow, you can even add notes for each section.

Despite all of this, I no longer really use this well thought out feature, opting to memorise the workout the vast majority of the time. Here are some of the issues and reasons why I go solo now.

Not long before writing this post, I used the workout feature to plan a session which included 6 x 400m at 5k target pace with 400m jog recoveries. It was a hot day so I did this on a shaded path to keep cool, and somewhere I could store a water bottle since I had to run around 1pm in the afternoon.

I quickly saw the hole in my plan though. Every time I was due to start a work effort, I had moved a few more metres away from the drink. Slowing down at the end of the previous work effort prior to turning back for the return 400m recovery, I’d lost around 15m. Then factor in turning around again slightly before the 400m recovery was finished so that I could get a true pace reading for the 400m effort, and I had shifted 20m or more in just 1 round. The lack of flexibility in being able to take a few extra seconds to grab a drink, meant that the session was good, but that I was gasping for a drink I the end, despite the shade that the trees provided.

On a previous occasion when I got my first Garmin, a Forerunner 235, I set a workout with pace alarms for the work and recovery periods. This was for a 1 mile out and back effort along another tree covered road. Unfortunately, the GPS was so intermittent that every few seconds the watch was buzzing to tell me I was going too fast, then too slow, too fast, too fast, slow, fast… you get the idea. By the end of the first mile I was at my wit’s end with it and restarted the workout without the use of the pre-programmed session. Needless to say, the rest of the efforts were much smoother and more enjoyable.

For people newer to running, planning the sessions can be beneficial as it’s one less thing to remember when you’ll be finding the run itself difficult, so I’m not entirely against using the feature.

If you like the workout feature, here are a couple of suggestions to work around the issues I found.

1) Plan recoveries based on a rough time for the distance, rather than programming a distance. It gives you more flexibility for efforts and can be handy when running fast paces on narrow pathways or those with tight corners. The extra few seconds help with safety and a better gauge of your effort.

2) An alternative to distance or time for recoveries, is to use the lap button on your watch. You can select this option for any part of the session (I use this to end my warm up whenever I do use the workouts).

3) Put target pace information in the notes for each section so you don’t need to use pace alarms. This eliminates the GPS issues I had, whilst still giving you all the information you would have had.