Perfect Disaster – The Joys of HR

This one just took the biscuit. Then crunched it up and threw it back at me.

A Day At The Testing Track – the 3x the5krunner

There’s normally one device that plays ball. Actually normally two and a half. But c’mon. None of them playing ball. Really!

This run was supposed to be either the ‘nail in the coffin’ or ‘the icing on the cake’ for the Vivoactive 3. You can only guess which, for now.

I half expected the Ionic to do what it did at the start…but at the end too….grrrrr.

I have been getting too blase recently. Things have been going too well. Luck has been on my side. I normally can get a good running power track with the watch in the back pocket and that back pocket watch can normally also get a good HR track from the HRM.

Not today folks.

Garmins often overwrite some metric lap settings during firmware updates, so I wasn’t getting on with the Vivoactive. Thus at 38 minutes I had no idea what my pace per mile meant. So I moved the backpocket watch to my wrist and voila!! The HR track from the chest strap rectifies itself! Strange that.

Unfortunately I put it on the same wrist as the Ionic. I didn’t really have THAT much of a choice as both wrists were pre-occupied. Naturally the Ionic then went pear-shaped. aka didn’t work. #sigh.

The Vivoactive was possibly rubbish, but who can say for sure? It looked OK at the end, with the history of the others it MIGHT have been alright all the way through.

Luckily it was a reasonably good session running-wise. Training goal achieved.

I try to capture every heartbeat for my personal use on one device or other. Today I failed. I think I shall treat myself to a bit of self-flattery and use the Ionic’s data.

The Takeaway

• You can’t reliably wear ANY other watch on the same lower arm as a watch you are testing the oHRM for.
• An ANT+ HR signal cannot reliably travel through the body from the chest to the rear waist.

But we knew that anyway.

The Solution

I will start to wear my running shorts backwards so that the pocket is on the front 😉

FWIW: The Vivoactive is likely correct enough at the start (actual: 140bpm ish) and end (actual: 160bpm) with the Ionic correct enogh in the middle bit (actual: 150bpm rising to 170bpm)

Someone should write about how to make HRMs work properly and then follow their own advice.

Fix *optical* HR and chest strap HR issues – Troubleshooting Garmin, Polar, TomTom, Suunto