Flight Of The Fēnix

A NEW RANGE OF GARMIN SMART WATCHES HITS THE MARK IN MANY WAYS

- Jason Henderson

INITIALLY, I was a little dubious about the accuracy of the Garmin fēnix 6 series watches. While running a track work-out this month, I programmed the watch to time and measure me over 10 efforts of a quarter of a mile with 90sec recovery. Years ago, I would have continually started and paused a stopwatch and even had to try to remember the splits myself. Yet now, I could run on auto-pilot as the watch issued a five-bleep countdown at the start and finish of every effort. The only problem was, the watch frustratingly bleeped to end each effort a few metres after the finish of each 400 metres circuit.

‘Hmm, not 100% accurate, is it?’ I thought to myself. But then I realised that a quarter of a mile is slightly longer than 400 metres!

A mile is 1609m in total, so the watch was in fact spot on and I had effectively been outsmarted by the smart watch.

When the session ended there was further proof that the watch was far cleverer than myself, or indeed any of the watches I have worn in the past, when I synced the device to the Garmin Connect app on my phone and I began to soak up the statistics. In addition to every repetition being measured for time, there were details of my heart rate (the average and maximum), cadence (average and maximum plus average stride length), together with details such as the temperature, elevation and so on.