So now that the Christmas thing is done and dusted, time to get on with life. Well okay, not quite, our household is still basking in the Christmas glow a little bit. But training wise, today it was back into it.
This morning I was down to the pool again. I had organised to meet up with a couple of guys from the swim squad to do a session. I always have mixed feelings about doing this sort of swim session, because often you spend a lot of time faffing around, not that much time swimming around and the whole thing becomes a waste of time. Not this moring though. With the help of the new swim smooth app I went armed with a planned threshold session. The guys were happy to go along with it and we belted it out. 3km in 50 minutes if you don't mind, fairly efficient for a training session. I enough time for some drills etc at the end, so all up it was a very beneficial swim.
Tonight it was running time. This run was the same as I have been doing for the last week and a bit and one again it went okay. Tough work if I am honest, but very similar to the run I did on Wednesday. Quite windy again and on the warm side which made the conditions less than ideal. Still I got through and added that one to the bank.
I did briefly consider trying to catch up yesterday's bike session today as well. In the end I am glad I didn't since the run was tough enough without having the ride in my legs. As I have said in the past, sometimes when a session is missed you just have to blow it a kiss and get on with your life. I think yesterday's session is one of them. I often talk about not taking the easy option, which I did yesterday. However, on the flip side, if you can't take the easy option on Christmas, when can you?
Today was my first day or training with the new Garmin 920XT. Well I say training, but I should also say living, because one of the things they have introduced with the 920 is that you can use it as a watch day to day, which is very cool. This morning I took it for a swim. I gather the capabilities of the 920 are very similar to the 910 when it comes to swimming, a few tweaks but nothing ground breaking. However, I never really used the 910XT in the pool, so the the whole swimming with a GPS thing was a new experience. I have to say it didn't go that smoothly, with the watch missing about 2km of the session, which in my book is a fair bit. Still I know what I did wrong and so should be able to avoid that in future. Rest assured it was user error, rather than watch error.
Running with the 920XT this afternoon was very similar to using the 910XT, which wasn't a surprise, they haven't changed much there. Well, they have introduced some of the running metrics which have previously been used in the Forerunner 620, ie cadence etc, which is all very useful on analysis, but in practice it feels a lot like the 910. So I wasn't particularly disappointed that the 920 functioned like the 910 on the run, since that is exactly what I was after.
In fact with the 920XT it isn't so much the individual sports that make this a nifty device, it is what the watch offers as a whole. I have only had it for one day, but so far it feels like a much more complete device than the 910XT. Really a watch designed to do everything. Be a watch, be a smartwatch, be an activity monitor, be a swim watch, be a GPS. It does it all. Very cool so far.
Unfortunately our experience hasn't been so rosy with the Garmin Vivosmart that I got for my wife for Christmas. She has been using the Vivofit for a while and has really enjoyed it. We are thinking of passing on the Vivofit to her mum and I thought it was an excellent excuse to upgrade. Turns out though that I didn't do enough research. A lot of what makes the Vivosmart a step up from the Vivofit relies on the device talking to your phone through Bluetooth. This is a problem if that connection just refuses to happen, or just constantly fails, which is what has been happening to us. My wife uses a Nexus 5 mobile phone, which is a pretty mainstream phone. However, Garmin has a list of phones that the Vivosmart definitely works for (a list of a whole 9 phones for Android) and the Nexus isn't on there, which I didn't realise until after the fact. Garmin specifically says that if the phone isn't on the list, issues may (ie will) arise.
A quick Google search reveals the connection issues to be something that others have had and not just with the Nexus. Reading a number of forums (riveting) it looked like the issues were resolved until the latest version of Android came out (Lollipop) and then a whole crop of new issues arose. My wife's phone recently upgraded to Lollipop and from what we are seeing (and others online it would seem) it is causing problems. Apparently Lollipop changes the way the device handles Bluetooth fairly significantly, which might be where the issues stems from. Very frustrating though. At the moment we are faced with the choice of hoping that the issue gets resolved as Lollipop becomes more widespread, changing phones or using the Vivosmart as a very pretty pedometer. A bit of a damper on the whole gift giving thing if I am being honest. We really are hoping it gets sorted, as it is the Vivosmart is a bit useless.
Now if you will excuse me, the Doctor Who Christmas Special will not watch itself.
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