Four Things I Wish I Knew Before Training With the Garmin Forerunner 265
The Garmin Forerunner 265 was the first modern running watch I spent a lot of time with – you can read my review here about how it got me tracking all my running data again, for better or worse. But there are some things that, looking back, I wish I’d understood better at the start. Here are the most important ones you might be interested to know.
Why does it have so many damn buttons?
The 265 (and other recent Forrunners) feel like there are too many buttons. Why do we need five of them when we already do most things from the touchscreen? Garmin’s Vivoactive line gets by with just two, as do the Coros Pace 3 and Pace Pro , which have all the same basic features as the 265.
But once I saw the previous generation, the Forerunner 255, I knew. The 265 stands on the shoulders of giants, as the Forerunner 2xx series has long been beloved by runners—before the 265, there was the 255, and before that, the 245, and before that, the 235. (Remember how Strava reported that the 235, then an eight-year-old watch, was the most popular running watch in the world?)
The 255 and its ancestors didn’t have a touchscreen, and they didn’t have AMOLED displays. They used a “light” button in the top left corner to turn on the backlight so you could read the screen in the dark, and two buttons below it (up and down) to scroll through menu options. And since you have five buttons, why not use them for more? Long-pressing the “light” button now brings up a context menu, long-pressing the “up” button brings up settings, and long-pressing the bottom button can bring up music controls.
Once you learn what the buttons are used for, or assign them your own shortcuts (you can do this in the settings), they become quite handy.
Why does he think I need so much time to “recover”
After each workout, the 265 (and many other Garmins) will tell you how many hours of recovery it thinks you need. This sounds like you should rest until the time is up – so if I have a 24-hour recovery time, I should wait until tomorrow for my next workout. This makes sense, since I was probably going to do it anyway.
But sometimes, after a hard effort, the watch gives me a recovery time of, say, 78 hours. Should I not run that long again? Even an easy jog?
Of course, that’s not what it means. As Garmin explains , recovery time is the amount of time until you get the maximum benefit from another equally intense workout . So if I just did an hour of brutal intervals on the track, I won’t get much benefit from doing the same workout tomorrow. I might go for an easy run tomorrow and schedule another track workout in a few days.
In other words, “recovery” time is how long you should wait before doing another very intense workout, not until you can’t exercise at all.
The suggested daily workouts should be taken as recommendations only.
Daily Suggested Workouts are a great feature on the Forerunner 265 and a few other Garmin watches. The DSWs, as I call them, are on the watch and can’t be accessed directly from the Garmin Connect app — at least in theory.
The app has a customisable ‘Garmin coach’ feature that works in the same way as DSW, giving you a workout each day based on what it thinks you need. Factors it takes into account include how recovered you are and what races you have on the calendar.
I like DSW when I’m not sure what to run on a given day, or if I know I want a certain type of workout but don’t want to design it myself. But I don’t follow them slavishly for two reasons.
One is that you can’t plan DSW. You might see that tomorrow is a seven-mile run, but then you wake up and find that it’s been replaced with a two-mile recovery run because you didn’t sleep well. On those days, just run the seven-mile run and don’t worry about what Garmin says. Or look at your upcoming workouts (under Workouts > Workouts > Daily Suggestions ) and pick a future workout that works for you.
Another problem is that without long-term planning, you don’t know if DSW will prepare you for the race you’re training for. Garmin forums and subreddits are full of people who are approaching their alarmingly close marathon date and haven’t done any real long runs yet. You need the mileage to be ready for a long race, both in terms of long runs and overall weekly workload.
If you want to use Garmin workouts to prepare for a long race, do yourself a favor and get a proven marathon plan, like one of these from Hal Higdon . Make sure you run the same number of miles each week, whether your Garmin tells you to or not.
You can download some nice watch faces
I’m not sure why I stuck with the standard dials for so long, although I found them boring. The 265 doesn’t have as many color options as later watches like the 570, so there are only a few designs and a few color options (mostly neon) to choose from.
But if you’re willing to take the plunge and head to the Connect IQ store , you’ll have more options. It feels a little iffy if you’re buying a watch face — payment isn’t processed directly through the platform — but there are some real gems there, including some made by Garmin and some that are free or have a free version. Around Christmas, I picked up this cheesy wreath , and my everyday favorite is the blue-themed Big Easy . It’s the one you can see in the photo above, and unlike most third-party watch faces, it can display all of my favorite complications, including the weekly mileage I have at the bottom.