This month I wanna talk about a feature that is part of the Garmin fitness watch realm. For over a year I have been using the "workouts" portion of the Garmin Connect website. This feature allows me to program my workouts and then download them to my Garmin watch. That seems like such a simple statement. But if you have ever done a track workout, you might be able to appreciate how much I love this feature. So let's do a little comparison. Early on in my running journey, a member of my running group posted a series of track workouts she had done with a prior running group of her own. This series included a variety of track distances and repeats. I decided it would be good for me to try to add some speed work to my repertoire and took to using these workouts. They were, as track workouts are, hard. And I had a love/hate relationship with them. I loved how badass I would feel after I finished them. But I hated having to do them. And let me be clear here, running speed workouts is not easy. You push yourself to the limit of your pace and your mental stamina. But that is not that part that I hated. I had a very difficult time learning how to pace during the sprints. I would go out REALLY fast and never really have a good idea of how fast I was going. My watch would tell me but ultimately it was calculating the mile pace so it would be all over the place while I was running the various repeats. And doing math in my head to figure out what is going on while trying to run fast and, you know, breathe wasn't exactly working out. And the part that was really hard for me, was knowing which repeat I was on and how close to being done the workout I was. Its fine when you only have to do 4 or 5 repeats, but when the number of repeats, or the number of laps gets higher and my brain gets more tired, even counting gets a little fuzzy. Enter the Garmin Connect workout feature!
So how does it work? You go to the Garmin Connect website and login to your account. Then you access the workouts section from under the Training menu. From there you can create your workout. I have never written my own workout, I do not have that expertise, but I have certainly programmed in the workout I am following from another source. When I first started programming them in, I just put in the repeats and distances. It wasn't until I used the Hanson's method that I added in the piece for pace. The plan calls for very specific pace goals based on goal finish time. So I was able to put the low and high pace for the repeats into the Garmin workout. Now comes the part I love. When it's time to complete the workout, I downloaded the workout to my watch the night before. Then the morning of, I just navigate to the workout menu on my forerunner, choose the workout for the day, and start. Beeps and text alerts on the watch let me know when to begin and end segments and if I am moving too fast or slow. Completing speed work this way took all the anxiety out of it for me. Now I can just be anxious about the fast running part ;). It has improved my consistency in completing the workouts because I am no longer dreading the workout in the same way. And because I am free to just run, my speed on the workouts, and in general, have improved as well. If you haven't tried this out....do it....soon. You will not regret it.
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