I've been avoiding the inevitable treadmill run for this week. Today's weather made further delay impossible. With 3-4 inches of rain predicted by Saturday morning, it's hard to see a path clear to outdoor running for a working man.
It was a chance to try out the indoor function of my Garmin Forerunner 220. With a motion sensor built in, it is possible to get distance without a foot pod. Calibration is supposedly accomplished by running outdoors enough the watch learns your stride length. All good in theory. In practice, not so much.
The club uses commercial-grade treadmills, which in my experience are very good and fairly accurate, at least to the point I get equivalent workouts compared to outdoors. I set the speed to 7.5 mph (8-minute pace) to start out. After a couple of miles warming up, I dropped it 3/10's of a mile an hour for every one of the remaining 6 miles. In the final half-mile I cranked it down to 6:15 pace.
The results were, to say the least, disappointing.
My first mile on the watch was 8:53. Second similar, third similar, and so on. I was stuck in a groove. Finally, when I was near 7-minute pace on the treadmill, I got a mile in the 8:25 range. Now perhaps an argument could be made the treadmill isn't as accurate as I think, but let me just say I asked the nice man supervising for a mop so I could clean up the floor surrounding the treadmill. He thought I was joking, but I wasn't. I have to run pretty hard to get that much sweat up.
So no, I wasn't running near 9-minute pace. I can do that in my sleep. No, the accuracy of the sensor, at least for me, is so far off as to be unusable.
On to tomorrow... I need to run again. I'm thinking 7-10 miles. That would put me in position to finish my week on Friday with a solid run. This would in turn set me up to ride all weekend long.
Speaking riding this weekend, right now the plan is for 100 miles on Saturday. Scott, Allen, and I are hashing out details, which I will post here when complete.
It was a chance to try out the indoor function of my Garmin Forerunner 220. With a motion sensor built in, it is possible to get distance without a foot pod. Calibration is supposedly accomplished by running outdoors enough the watch learns your stride length. All good in theory. In practice, not so much.
The club uses commercial-grade treadmills, which in my experience are very good and fairly accurate, at least to the point I get equivalent workouts compared to outdoors. I set the speed to 7.5 mph (8-minute pace) to start out. After a couple of miles warming up, I dropped it 3/10's of a mile an hour for every one of the remaining 6 miles. In the final half-mile I cranked it down to 6:15 pace.
The results were, to say the least, disappointing.
My first mile on the watch was 8:53. Second similar, third similar, and so on. I was stuck in a groove. Finally, when I was near 7-minute pace on the treadmill, I got a mile in the 8:25 range. Now perhaps an argument could be made the treadmill isn't as accurate as I think, but let me just say I asked the nice man supervising for a mop so I could clean up the floor surrounding the treadmill. He thought I was joking, but I wasn't. I have to run pretty hard to get that much sweat up.
So no, I wasn't running near 9-minute pace. I can do that in my sleep. No, the accuracy of the sensor, at least for me, is so far off as to be unusable.
On to tomorrow... I need to run again. I'm thinking 7-10 miles. That would put me in position to finish my week on Friday with a solid run. This would in turn set me up to ride all weekend long.
Speaking riding this weekend, right now the plan is for 100 miles on Saturday. Scott, Allen, and I are hashing out details, which I will post here when complete.
So is it possible or not to use garmin forerunner 220 inside ?? Really curious... as i even just bought a footpod for mine and still seems so inaccurate!
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