What It’s Like to Train for a Race With Garmin Training Plans

I recently reviewed the Forerunner 265 , a $499 running watch from Garmin. Along the way, I started fiddling with parts of the watch and the app that promised to give me a training plan, and eventually asked it to train me for a 5K race. (That’s five kilometers or 3.1 miles.) I enjoyed the training and ended up with my best 5K time in years. Let me tell you how it went and how you can potentially have a similar experience.

What I wanted to get from the training plan

Ultimately, I just wanted to test the watch for review and that was my main goal. I didn’t approach it with the question, “How can I do the best I can in a race?” – although my thoughts began to wander in this direction after I had been training for a while.

The Garmin app and some of their watches (depending on the model) can provide you with training plans for a variety of distances, including marathon (26.2 miles), half marathon (13.1 miles), 10K (6.2 miles) and 5 ​km (3.1 miles). distances.

This shortest distance, 5K, is a common gateway into racing for beginners . In most places and in most seasons, you can find a 5K to race on almost any weekend. They’re beginner-friendly so you don’t have to worry about whether you’re “fast enough,” but even experienced runners may be excited by the prospect of improving their 5K time. I’ve done a lot of 5K races, but none lately. I always liked them better than long races.

After practicing with the watch for a while, I decided that I still wanted to run a fast 5K. What better way to test out watch training plans than to try them yourself? And what better way to test their adaptability than to repeatedly turn down suggested workouts because, oh well, life is busy and running isn’t my top priority? I made it through and had a great time on race day.

How training plans work on your Garmin watch

When you wear a Garmin watch, you install an app on your phone called Garmin Connect. It allows you to view your runs and health data from your phone, create workouts, change settings, and more.

The app allows you to customize your workouts in several ways.

• You can create workouts and add them to your calendar. The workout you added will appear on the screen when you start running on your watch that day.

• You can download or sync a workout plan from another app or source. For example, the Runna app can add workouts to your Garmin calendar.

• You can use Garmin’s Coach feature to choose from “expert” Garmin Coach plans with Coach Greg, Coach Amy, or Coach Jeff.

• On some watches, including Forerunner 265 and later, you can use Garmin Coach to select an adaptive training plan.

The last two are what people usually mean when they talk about Garmin training plans. I primarily used the adaptive training plan, but have played around with both and can tell you the differences in their features.

There is another way to train using your Garmin watch. Some watches, including the Forerunner line, have a version of the “daily recommended workout” (often abbreviated DSW). The Forerunner 55 and 165 will only give you the current day’s workout, while the 265, 965, and Fenix ​​watches will let you view the entire week’s DSW (and even let you do a future workout earlier).

The adaptive training plan is only available if you have a weekly DSW watch. This includes mid-range and high-end running watches, including the Forerunner 255, 265 and 965, as well as the Fenix ​​line (versions 6 and up). A complete list of compatible Garmin watches can be found here . The Adaptive Workout Plan is essentially an app-friendly version of the Daily Recommended Workouts. If your watch doesn’t support full week DSW – say you have a Vivoactive 5 – you can still use Garmin Coach, but you’ll be limited to the Expert plans.

How Garmin’s Expert Plans Differ from Their Adaptive Plans

If you’re trying to choose between two types of plans and you have a watch that supports both, here are the main differences:

Timing

Expert plans allow for a certain number of weeks between the start and the day of the competition. For example, when making my plan today (early November), I was unable to include a race date in March. Each plan has a minimum and maximum number of weeks of training, which will vary from plan to plan.

On the other hand, the adaptive plan will work no matter when you race. If it’s far in the future, you’ll just get non-specific training until race day gets closer.

Friendly face

Each expert program has a personal trainer – a real person with a face and name. This trainer doesn’t talk to you personally, but he has made videos describing his training philosophy and giving advice, and each expert plan has its own vibe. For example, Coach Jeff will use run/walk intervals (he’s famous for this ).

There is nothing like this in adaptive plans. There is no trainer’s name, no video with advice or support. Just training.

Confidence indicator

There’s a nice little scale in the corner of the Expert Plans that shows how “confident” your coach is that you can achieve your goal. For example, if I ask for a specific 5K time, I’ll want to see that indicator green. This tells me that I am on the right track. If I get into the orange zone, I know I’m relaxing. There’s also a red zone, which means I’m really not on track, and at the other end there’s a purple zone, which means I’m doing so well that I can probably aim for a higher goal.

There is no confidence indicator in adaptive plans. (This is the main thing I’m missing with adaptive plans.) However, watches that support adaptive plans also tend to have a race prediction feature. You can access this through the app or by “looking” at your watch. This way you can check the forecast time at any time. However, this doesn’t take future training into account – so if I’m aiming for a 24-minute 5K race, but I’m currently in 26-minute shape, I’ll see 26 minutes when I look at my race predictor.

What the first few workouts look like

There is another big difference. Every time I choose an expert program, I start with a “control run” and no future training is planned until I pass this test. This is what I see now in Coach Greg’s 5K plan. In the past, when I did a 10K training plan with Coach Amy, I would get this benchmark run and a one-mile time trial in the first week.

On the other hand, adaptive training plans simply suggest workouts that will make sense for you given your current training status and goals. There are no benchmarks or time trials here. Just to check, I started an adaptive training plan today and the first thing on my schedule was an hour long “base” (easy) run.

Coincides with daily recommended workouts.

Here’s a fun fact: If you’re following the Pro plan, you can also access daily recommended workouts on your watch. They will simply be hidden. On the 265, press the middle left button and select Workout to view suggested workouts.

In an adaptive plan, your plan and suggested daily workouts are the same. Essentially, Adaptive Plan is a way to view your daily workout suggestions on your phone, something that wasn’t available in an app until recently.

Rescheduling

In Expert Plans, if you don’t like your schedule for the week, you can click the three-dot menu to reschedule a run on your calendar. This is convenient if, for example, you have hill repeats planned for tonight, but you can’t go to the park with your favorite hill until tomorrow.

On adaptive plans, you cannot transfer training to the future. However, you can do a future workout today. And if you miss today’s workout, there’s a good chance it will show up again in the future.

Other races on your calendar

The suggested daily workouts (and therefore adaptive plans) take into account any races you may want to fit into your calendar. You can only designate one of these as your main race for the training season, but the others can be “feeder” events and will be factored into your proposed training or adaptive plan.

As far as I can tell, this doesn’t happen with expert plans. They are designed for the specific race you customized them for.

Race distances

Expert plans are available for 5K, 10K, Half Marathon and Marathon races. Adaptive plans can be focused on race or personal goals for any distance.

Training with heart rate

In expert-led plans, workouts are usually assigned target paces. (For example, you might be assigned an easy run at a 10:30 minute per mile pace.) You can’t change this in your settings, but you can edit individual workouts if you want.

Adaptive plans allow you to set either pace or heart rate as your workout goals, and you can switch goals as needed. For example, if I’m going to run on a hilly road, I’ll use my heart rate target because I know I’ll slow down on those hills. After this switch, almost all runs in the plan will be set to heart rate targets rather than pace targets – until I decide to change it back.

How to use workouts from a training plan

Everything else I describe here works the same no matter which coaching option you use. You can read more about what it’s like to follow different types of Garmin workouts in my Forerunner 265 review .

Each training day, you simply press the Run button as usual (or Treadmill Run, Trail Run, or Track Run). The workout scheduled for that day will appear. Once you complete your workout, you’ll receive a progress score showing how closely you followed your plan for that day. (Anything above 66% is considered good.)

There is no penalty for a poor performance score or even for missing a run. You can find a similar workout planned for the future if the app thinks you need more of these runs in your workouts.

What have I done for my race

I didn’t immediately choose a race when I started using my Garmin watch. I was just trying to build up my mileage and be more consistent with my running habits. I initially chose the 10K plan with Coach Amy, but to be honest… it wasn’t for me. At least not for my current stage of education. There were threshold workouts that required me to maintain a pace that was too fast for too long, and I hated them. (In hindsight, they were probably fine, but it was hot outside and I wasn’t used to doing that kind of work.)

I ended up giving up on that plan and just doing the suggested daily workouts for a while. I didn’t follow them religiously; if the workout looked fun or interesting, I did it. If it looked miserable, I didn’t do it. You’d think such a lax attitude would lead to poor results, but I also had a target mileage in mind each week determined by my own brain, not the Garmin app. After running 20 miles that week (or 25, or 30—I gradually increased the pace), I knew I was doing okay.

This approach has paid off. I saw my predicted 5K time go from 30 minutes to 29, 28, and it kept falling. “You know…” I said to myself. “ There’s a half marathon in October in a cool place . I don’t want to do a half this year, but they have a four mile option. Maybe I’ll sign up for a four-mile race.” I put it into my calendar, my training adapted, and soon I was looking at forecasts for this race as well. I started dreaming about winning a medal in the age group.

Well, now that I was in a real race for goals , I decided that I would try the coaching plan again. This time I used the adaptive plan and asked him to train me for a 5K race (I didn’t realize I could have asked specifically for a four mile race) and added a fake 5K race to my calendar that was on the same day , which is the same as a 5K race. four-mile. And from now on – maybe two months later, if I remember correctly? — I did my best to complete as many workouts as planned.

I did miss a few of the more difficult threshold runs. 18 minutes at 5K pace? No, thanks. But that cute little sprint workout with 15-second bursts and long breaks? It’s fun, I’ll do it any time it comes out.

Even with this imperfect training, my predicted 5K time continued to drop. Then, the week of the race, disaster struck: a family event I couldn’t miss was rescheduled for the day of my race. Instead of planning a trip to the mountains to race on an abandoned highway , I used the “find an event” function in the Garmin calendar to find a 5K race that was on the same weekend, but on Saturday instead of Sunday . I was lucky: there were two options. I chose the one listed as “fast and flat” since the other was described as “challenging” (i.e. hilly).

The day before the race, my watch showed a finish time of 25:50. I ran the race and finished in 26:04. Unfortunately, the GPS measurement on the watch was 3.09, so I was not officially credited for the new 5K PR. (This isn’t an absolute record for me, but as far as Garmin knows, it would be a record. My best 5K time was 25:20, and that was thirteen years ago , so that’s pretty darn cool in my opinion.)

My advice for running on Garmin plans (any of them)

Here I’ll describe a few things I don’t like and give tips on how to get around them. Preferences vary, so you may find that what bothers me may not bother you. However, this is my personal advice.

First of all, it annoys me that you can’t look ahead and see what’s in store for you throughout your training plan. This is true no matter what type of plan you choose. In the first week there is no way to know what awaits you in the eighth week. Now I’m happy to play fast and loose during 5K training because 5K is a low-key, low-pressure race. They regenerate quickly and cost, what, 25 bucks to get in? If you have a bad 5K, you’ll learn from it and be able to run another distance the following weekend.

However, if I had a big goal race planned, like a marathon, I wouldn’t dream of trusting it all to an app that could make a difference for me. Every now and then you’ll see someone on Reddit asking what they should do because their marathon is only a month or two away and they still haven’t run anything longer than an hour or so. This is a terrible story, even if it turns out that the person configured the plan incorrectly or missed so many runs that he couldn’t figure out what to assign. You don’t have to find out the hard way.

So my advice is to set yourself one or two overall leadership goals. A weekly mileage goal is a good option because mileage is one of the most important factors in running progress. Regardless of what my app suggested, I made sure my mileage was always within my target mileage for the week. (For me, it was 20 to 30 miles.) It’s not bad to trust a program when it occasionally gives you a week that’s harder or easier than you expected, but having a rough goal helps make sure you’re on track. – or overdo it for weeks on end.

If you’re training for a longer race, such as a marathon or half marathon, you’ll probably also need a rough idea of ​​the duration of your long runs and the weekly mileage you should be logging, especially during peak weeks . Take a look at an installed program (such as one of the free ones from Hal Higdon ) to make sure you’re more or less on the right track. For example, one to two months before race day, you should do several runs ranging from 16 to 20 miles.

Another thing to remember is that you know your body better than any application. If you need an extra rest day or a light jog instead of working out, do it. The plan will be adapted. And if you need a type of workout that isn’t planned (like a hill repeat when you have a hilly race coming up), just substitute it. You’re not hurting anyone’s feelings, and any good plan can withstand a healthy dose of life getting in the way .

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