There are various things I like about my new Garmin 235.
It took me a long time to decide to switch from to my Garmin. The foremost being that I have about 3 years’ running metrics stored in Suunto’s Movescount platform and that the Suunto Ambit I have, while outrageously outdated worked really well.
The only thing that broke was the compass and that didn’t irritate me that much. What did start bothering me was the need to remember to carry my heart rate strap with me. So much so that I eventually stopped using and just qualifying that by feeling that pace and time were only important. And this worked for a long time.
Then, I decided to sort that situation out by buying a mio-link Ant+ wrist strap with integrated heart rate monitor. That was grand, I felt I plugged the gap. I did after a while of good use, I’d have to remember to charge it and then I’d have to remember to put it on. Even though it was easier to wear than a heart rate monitor, it felt unnecessary to have it on all the time. It’s didn’t do anything most of the time other than when I was running. So again, I was back to fumbling with things and I’m not a great one for doing that for a long time. I quite like just deciding to go for a run and that’s it.
This ultimately brought me to where I am today. I have a watch that I wear 24/7 and that monitors my steps and heart rate both when I’m running and when I’m not. Finally Fusion.
What I liked about my Ambit was that it was rock-solid. It had wear and tear, it had chips and dents and it didn’t complain. I never worried about it being knocked about. It’s a nice thing to have. One less thing to worry about. It was tough. So despite its age and broken compass and lack of integrated heart rate sens, or it was good.
The new Garmin is very much smaller, thinner and lighter. That’s a beautiful thing because I notice it and I like it. The other thing is that it’s got beautiful simplicity about it, yet has everything I need, technology wise. I don’t have ABC functionality and I don’t need it. It has more functionality that I need than the ambit had and this deterred me from buying another Ambit like a watch with ‘everything’. I was considering a Garmin Fenix 3/5 but could not justify the features required, extra features and the price tag. The 235 is an above-satisfactory ‘compromise’ between that extreme and what I need. This makes me happy.
It’s important to feel confident that a decision you’ve made is the one you’d go with every time. It’s psychological.
A very welcome feature is the VO2 max reading it gives you. This is great and built into the screens. I love the fact that it has vibrations, either as alarms or in-flight alerts for pace/hr/distance. Very pleased about that. Al,so a nice change is not needing to ‘plug in’ to sync activities. I can connect the watch via Bluetooth to the phone to do this.
The inbuilt activity tracker and sleep tracker also really make the whole package that much sweeter and it’s working while I’m not! That’s value for time otherwise not measured. I also like the strap, colour and the font.
The problem with having all my data in movescount was remedied by initially downloading a python script that fetched it all. Then Suunto also recently added the ability to export all activities too! I then imported it into a central place, namely training peaks and have got both movescount and Garmin Connect sending activities to it. That’s grand.
I’ve also taken time to send my data to other places to evaluate how well they represent my training data. I’ve used trainasone, 2peak and smashrun in addition to training peaks. I used fitness synced to sync my data to these places. Very cool. Am I concerned about my health data here? Possibly but not really. Anyway whether I ultimately buy into these solutions is yet to be seen. I’m currently a free user on training peaks, but I was briefly a premium member until I added duplicates to my account and decided to redo the whole thing, and as a consequence, I redid it as a free user. It’s quite expensive otherwise. £16 a month is eye-watering and I can’t justify that. So free seems fine.
I can’t seem to get my data into Garmin Connect so this will be my base from now on and I’ll sync from Garmin to training peaks as and when I perform activities. This will keep track of my ATL, CTL and TSB scores too. In addition, my watch tells me vo2 max(which incidentally is 59 which is rather high) and Smash-run gives me graphs(though I’m a free user this is sufficient). Don’t think I need trainasone or 2peak accounts as they are geared towards telling me what to do in contrast to showing me what I’ve done - which is more what I want than a coach.
A good day...