Garmin vivosmart HR+ review

Finally, I moved from a Garmin Forerunner 225 to a Vivosmart HR+. Mainly this is because the Vivosmart is smaller, lighter and has a GPS and also because, honestly, I don’t need all of the Forerunner features. Moreover, the Forerunner doesn’t mount on MacOS so one can’t upgrade firmware, transfer calendars and training plans and so on.

The vivosmart is a good fit, but there are some not-so-minor caveats:

GPS is slow, and if you decide to give up, you don’t have a choice besides a indoor activity (with the Forerunner you could run an activity with a poor GPS tracking anyway).

You cannot manually mark laps. There is only one button, and is for start/stop.

From a tech perspective, you have all the sensors and the analytics capabilities of a high level device (accelerometer and so on). The software is amazing, and tracking an outdoor run without GPS on a known path provided an excellent result (equivalent to a GPS enabled tracking).

Finally, the vivosmart is a good deal for me (YMMV), especially because I manage to train intervals on track.

Garmin Forerunner 225

I purchased the Forerunner 225 because of the wrist-based heart-rate monitor.
As a owner of a 410 (which I find often overkill, for my needs), I didn’t expect more.
I am surprised and delighted to learn that it includes an accelerometer as well. This means that you have, for free, cadence and stride length.

For a data geek, this means a lot of data to play with and, hopefully, some useful insights. More to come.

Should I run that semi marathon?

Say that you want to run a semi marathon but you’re not sure about how you will perform WRT the average runner. The Sémi Maraton of Paris, with > 30k runners is quite a different story than the Sémi Marathon de Nogent with ~ 2000 600 runners. If you’re not fast, you will not be alone in the former, but you will be noticed in the latter. Continue reading “Should I run that semi marathon?”