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Polar S625X vs Garmin Forerunner
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This is my first post on this thread so can I start by saying thanks to you all for the informed debate on the two products. It certainly helped me make an educated decision when it came to purchasing time.
Like BeepBeep, I too plumped for the 625x a week past and so far so good. My logic for choosing the Polar was that though I run outside for my long runs at weekends, I do most of my weekday running at the gym and I want to accumulate data for all my runs rather than just the weekend one (which the Garmin would be limited to - clearly no signal in the gym!).
I do, however, have one observation, having yet to calibrate the gadget, and that is the slower I run the less accurate the pacing readout becomes - at least it doesn't match the output on the running machine. Total Distance covered seems to be accurate enough, but as I increase speed it seems to get better.
As an example I was doing an interval session and during the effort segments I was running at 5.58 min/mile on the running machine and the Polar was at 6.00 which is fine, but during recovery I was up to 9 min/mile and the watch was at 10 min/mile.
Clearly this is a function of stride length but my concern is that if I calibrate at a certain rate it is going to skew in one direction or the other when I change speed.
The consolation at the moment is that at least it errs on the cautious side ie telling me I'm going slower when I'm going quicker, I can can use the HR function to keep me focussed on my pace too.
Any thoughts would be welcomed. (And sorry about the lengthy post).
And I thought I was the only one that wore the pod on a public treadmill! The treadmill/watch combination is ideal for measuring heart rate trends for identical runs. Have you tried the overlaying plots on PPPSW. I think up to 5 can be done at one time.
Polar claims 97% accuracy uncalibrated and doesn't mention stride contraints. Calibration is for making accuracy improvements on the 97%. Effect on stride changes will impact you when you try for higher accuracies. Most of the complaints I see on other forums occur when they try for around 99% in which case some Polar bugs come into effect.
I would tend to blame the treadmill. I see speed variations when I run the same speed on different treadmills. You'll probably need to run on several of your gym's mills with the two speeds in question and see if you can deduce the culprit. 10% error you're seeing, sames way too high for a Polar issue.
I think XL-man is narrowing down his problem (see above) to a large sample interval (60 secs), so I think we'll hear a report from him shortly.
Thanks for your thoughts. I'll try different machines, though typically things are on hold today as throat and head playing up. I am using 5 second observations to keep things as accurate as possible. Weekend run was good: 9.1m on polar vs 8.97m on mapminder. Not too bad.
I haven't tried the overlay charts yet but if things go to plan (ie fitness improves!)that should make for an interesting analysis.
And I must admit I haven't seen any other pods at my gym either - perhaps people just need someone to show them the light!
just to confirm OMM's suspicions.
The 625 is MUCH better with 15s sample times instead of 1 minute. Also getting much smaller discrepancies with automatic lap times set to 1 mile.
Like you TmR, I'm baffled by the clever technology, but the gadget is wonderful.