The Best Running Watch with Music will have great sound quality, great battery life and access to lots of your favourite tunes from your music library. Is that statement correct? And is that all? What about streaming music services? Headphone compatibility? An inbuilt speaker? Or, indeed, if music playback will work without your smartphone? Let’s…
Suunto Spartan Sport Wrist HR Baro Preview The Suunto Spartan Sport Wrist HR Baro Stealth is certainly a mouthful but probably better than SSSWHRBS. I’m feeling sorry for myself today having just failed to get a 10 mile PB. Writing a full review takes a looong time so I got the camera out and enjoyed the…
Today’s announcement from Suunto signals, possibly, one of several incremental/upcoming additions to the existing SPARTAN range. It’s snappily abbreviated to SSSWHRB. Glad we cleared that one up. Like with the previous AMBIT series and its variants, I expect any further SPARTANs to be ‘tweaks’ to the exiting models. What is the SSSWHRB? It’s a mouthful,…
A Great UK deal for runners wanting to start out running with power with STRYD. Well 2 deal bundles to be precise. You can get the Garmin Forerunner 235+STRYD for £350 or the Suunto Spartan SPORT WHR + STRYD for £300. Both are great options. The SPARTAN probably has more accurate hardware and the Garmin…
A detailed review of SUNGOD’s custom built sports-specific sunglasses PaceBreakers model – Discount codes, promotional rebates, coupons, not available
I was recently and kindly sent the new SPORT UTILITY PACK by the inventor, Richard. I don’t really carry bags/pack when running, although I frequently do carry larger hydration packs (eg CAMELBAK) on longer trail rides. What took my interest was the mini-hydration and general ‘utility’ nature of the product for sport (hence the name…
Science In Sport kindly sent me some free product in return for my thoughts on 2x new products. Here they are: GO CAFFEINE SHOT I used to take Red Bull shots for caffeine but they are now no longer available. So, for me this is a welcome replacement. First up – YOU should be taking…
The music lovers and more senior athletes amongst you will recognise the oblique reference in the title to Bat out of Hell. If neither the title nor that reference mean anything to you then, don’t worry, you’re almost certainly faster/younger than me 😉 After the running injury debacle a couple of months ago, things in…
I’ve had a rather enjoyable weekend training. If you are in the UK you might know that the weather has been pretty awesome recently and that we now have a weekend with a public holiday. My first visit to the lake was yesterday and it was actually quite warm. Bizarrely so (physics). My first visit…
Suunto Spartan Sport Review – Wrist HR It’s nearly a year since Suunto sprang the SPARTAN on an unsuspecting world (Summer 2016), here in this Suunto Spartan Sport review, we take a detailed look at the wrist heart rate (whr) version. We all were waiting for the AMBIT 4 and we got the top-end SPARTAN ULTRA. Then we…
Polar have confirmed to me that the M430 running watch has indeed got new innards. Obviously the optical HR gave away the fact that something had changed internally 😉 Well, the GPS chip has also been updated to the same one as used by the V800 (SiRFstar IV) – generally renowned for good GPS accuracy.…
Before I start wittering on about gel, this is an interesting chart from QS EMFIT. It’s a 6 month daily trend of night-time and waking HRV. The green line is the waking HRV and the higher it is the better it is; the entire white line represents night recovery, sort of. It suggests that I’m…
OK here is a test from yesterday on my MTB on a trail. I was specifically looking at how optical HR handled a bumpy but flat hardened, mud/grass trail. The vibrations can cause problems for optical HR in general, so that is what I was looking at ie a demanding scenario. The Edge 820 is…
I’ve had the SPARTAN Sport WHR for a couple of weeks now and I have used it for lots of varied sessions, from 30 minutes to 4 hours, and probably well over 30 total hours of training. I’m still taking an overall view on the optical HR. I’ve been using either the SPORT (non-WHR) or the SPARTAN…
Just finished off a whole bunch of testing and then new firmware v1.8.26. Grrr !! 🙂 I need more pictures too don’t I? Just the one so far that’s any good !! 😉 Why take photos of beautiful watches when there are year-end accounts to do? (Not much to add up 😉 ) This firmware…
Garmin’s new 935 is currently priced at a near identical price point to Suunto’s Spartan Sport. Fix that in your mind and read on. The Spartan Sport has pretty awesome GPS and native STRYD support. I actually use it now for running most times I go out. I’m currently also using the WHR optical version…
I’ve had the SPARTAN Sport WHR (WHR = Wrist optical Heart Rate) for a couple of days now. For followers of the introduction of the SPARTAN series to the market there is nothing unexpected to write about at present. You knew it was coming and here it is. It’s real! It’s pretty much the same…
Great news today as my Fenix 3 returns home after a long enforced absence – a ‘friend’ ‘borrowed’ it and ‘forgot’ it was on his wrist! Unfortunately, as you can see from the above image, my 920XT has now ‘gone walkabout’…sigh. 🙂 It was a great time to put the Fenix 3 to my GPS-test-of-doom…
I knew something was wrong when the autolaps were quite a bit different from each other. With the new gps algorithm, with GLONASS enabled, and with firmware v1.6.14, I re-did my standard GPS test for the Spartan Ultra and the Spartan Sport I followed this methodology and this precise, standard route: http://the5krunner.com/courses/test-route-for-gps-devices/. That link also has all the…
Today’s new firmware for the SPARTAN is annoying as I now have to re-do a GPS test I did last week 🙂 although hopefully this line from the Suunto update notes “This update also brings a new GPS firmware to improve general tracking accuracy” suggests that the test might be worth re-doing and will find increased…
