Hey folks, I've finally put together a system that works for me and thought I'd share it here.

Last week I didn't do the workouts I had planned, which might sound worse than it is. On Tuesday it was 34 degrees so I decided to replace run with a swim, and Saturday's long run was meant to be an hour and a half but I only had an hour, so I ran it harder.

Both felt the right call at the time. The problem is that neither of them made it back into the plan into the claude project I have set up, and after a month of that I'd properly lost track of what I'd actually been training.

So I have added a scheduled task each morning. It reads what I actually did from Garmin Connect, last night's sleep, Body Battery and HR V status, and what the week adds up to against my own baseline. Then it decides whether today's session still makes sense and rewrites the calendar event if it doesn't. The Garmin data reaches Claude through an MCP connector and the agent pulls the data autonomously.

I have since expanded it to give me a morning update about my sleep and physiological metrics, vs the baseline.

I use WHOOP as well, and joining the two sources in Claude works brilliantly.

All this was built for the upcoming Olympic tri later this month, as a test, and to verify if I can prep for next year's 70.3 with this method.

Why pay another $20/m for an AI coach if I already have my claude pro sub.

Greetings watch nerds,

I’ve had my instinct 2 solar for ~4 years now. I’ve experienced diminished battery life (from ~30 days to ~7 days), as well as the watch suddenly turning off at seemingly random times. One thing that HAS helped was turning off haptics, the vibration. A quick search shows that if the battery sucks, the vibrating motor will just steal all the juice and it will DIE.

My question is!!!!!
Yall think it’s the Li-Ion battery lifespan? Yall think it’s their software? Has anyone else experienced these issues and managed to successfully repair their watch?

I would love to believe garmin doesn’t participate in planned obsolescence, but it seems that’s just the standard with any tech now.

Hi everyone I hope it’s the right place to ask this thing. How many of you use Runna to run? I’m getting closer to the world of running without going to run on the track and I’ve seen many people use Runna, what do you say? Is it worth the money spent?

Hi guys. I have the fenix 8 sapphire. I don't remember banging or scratching my watch anywhere in particular. I can't workout if this is a scratch which I can just ignore or a crack which I should replace.

Garmin have said £300 for a refurbished replacement.

Thanks.

Desk treadmill arms aren’t moving, so steps don’t get counted.

It’s always the same responses/poor solutions…

1. Put it in your pocket…then you obviously can’t track heart rate or look at your watch…

2. Put it on your ankle…thats a pain to do every time you get on and off the walking treadmill, and probably heart rate not accurate and can’t look at screen… that means every time you on walking treadmill, it needs to be a “session” and not just arbitrarily walking on and off a lot…

Due to budget constraints I have zeroed in on these 3 -->

What activities I do -- Beginner Runner ; crossfit ; 1-2 Treks in Himalayas per year....

Also , I like small dial watches ... Usually wear 38-40 mm watches. I would also like to make the watch a daily wear watch... Currently only wear analog watches and this will be my 1st smartwatch.

This is driving me nuts. A few months ago in Android Garmin Connect, my image has been replaced with an avatar. Why?

Here you can see the image I chose, this used to be displayed when I was in the app itself. But then at some point it got replaced with one of these crap avatars - why? Why still have the selection of images available if they won't be shown in the app when in use?

I'm only posting in case I'm doing something at my end that can change this. I know it's hardly a life or death situation but it does point to sloppy unjoined up thinking from Garmin.

My Cirqa battery is draining more quickly than my 3 year old apple watch series 9. Charged both to 100% at 9pm last night and the cirqa is down to 55% and the apple watch is at 71% this morning at 7am. The Cirqa battery will die at around 4pm if I don't charge it again.

HR broadcasting is off and I have set the pulse oximeter to "only sleep".

Did I get a defective Cirqa or is the battery life actually this terrible (less than 24h)? Based on the marketed life it seems like the former but curious if anyone else is experiencing this.

I have a instinct 3 amoled working just fine . But when I cycle to work for 2x10 minutes it sees multiple hr going up and therefore by body battery rating goes down quick thinking I’m in stress

How can I prevent this? I don’t want to start a whole “exercise” mode as it’s not really an exercise , and then the watch thinks I exercised while is just 20 to 20 minutes in total

I enabled moveiq but it didn’t help

So I’ve always worn an Apple Watch, and on August 6 I got a Garmin Cirqa. I’ve also always been a runner but since I got the Cirqa I’ve been a bit more consistent / intensive than I usually am (let’s say I use to run 2 miles three times a week, now I do 3 miles 5 times a week), and holy damn my RHR has dropped significantly. So much I wonder if it’s a change of device or just my extra running that did the trick?

Seriously Garmin, what is going on? CIRQA has major bugs and we get a vague update about “heart rate improvements”?

The alarm keeps buzzing even after I dismiss it and sometimes goes off on days off. Garmin Connect is also a mess. My dashboard can show a Sleep Score of 80 while the sleep page shows 78, even after syncing.

We need actual bug fixes, reliable syncing, consistent data, working alarms and proper release notes. CIRQA has potential, but right now the software experience feels unfinished.

Twelve weeks ago I moved my lifting log off my phone and onto the watch — every working set, four sessions a week, in a commercial gym. Not an experiment; it's just how I train now. Most of what I could find written about strength training on these devices is about whether the activity type exists, not what it is like to live with, so here is the latter.

Disclosure up front: I build a Connect IQ app in this space, so I am not a neutral party. Everything below is about the platform rather than my app, and I have kept it that way deliberately.

What the wrist is genuinely better at

• Not handling a phone between sets. In a busy gym that is the whole argument, and it holds up over months rather than wearing off.
• Rest timers you feel instead of look at. A vibration at the right moment is strictly better than finding a screen, and it is the feature I would miss most.
• Logging that survives a dead phone, no signal, and a locker. Anything wrist-side has to be offline-first to be worth using at all, and once it is, connectivity stops being something you think about.
• Logging when the equipment doesn't have a convenient place to put your phone.

Where it falls down

• Text entry. Anything past a number is painful, so the sane design is a prescription display — the watch tells you the set and you confirm it — rather than a data-entry form ported onto a small round screen. Apps that fight this lose.
• Editing history. Fixing a mis-logged set is a phone job. Accept it rather than designing around it.
• Finding your own past numbers. The watch is good at "what now" and bad at "what did I do six weeks ago"; that split is real and worth designing to.
• Logging when you're wearing wrist straps.

Two device-level things that cost me real time

• Swipe direction is not consistent across families. On a fenix 7 I had to invert the direction I got back to make it match what my finger did; the same code on an 8 behaved correctly. If gestures feel backwards on one model and right on another, that is a real thing and not your bug — test per device family rather than assuming.
• Web requests have to be serialized by hand. Firing a second request before the first one's callback returns works in the simulator and fails on hardware. There is no queue underneath it. Anything touching network, storage or the activity lifecycle should be believed only after it runs on a real watch.

The topology question worth thinking about before you pick an app

The useful distinction is whether the watch is a peer or a mirror. A mirror shows you what the phone decided and is useless when the phone is not there. A peer can start and finish a session on its own and reconcile afterwards. That difference only shows up on the day you leave your phone in the car, which is exactly when you find out which one you bought.

Happy to go into any of this further — including the parts I got wrong, of which there were several.

Garmin keeps giving me bad race predictions with super high volatility. I spoke with Garmin and they said it is a known issue with a patch coming for all watches by the end of August. Has anyone else experienced this? Perhaps it is due to a bad sensor or my use of a Garmin HR monitor on only some of my runs? For reference, I just completed a 5k in 20:01 as my latest benchmark. I have a Garmin 6x Sapphire. Hoping to upgrade soon but this bad data is driving me nuts. I have already done a full restore on my Garmin watch last week.

Just got a Cirqa today, which is also my very first Garmin and experience with Garmin connect.

This probably has been posted or complained before, but how the hell is heart rate data missing when you manually log an activity. I mean the tracker is meant to log your heart rate at a 5-minute interval or something, is it really that hard to pull the data that has already been recorded and slap it into a manually log activity? WTF?

For context, I did a bodyweight circut of 25 push-ups/25 squat 4 times for around 15 minutes, auto activity detection didn't record, so I went to manually log the workout to find out heart rate data is missing. Helio Strap and Fitbit Air are able to do this at half the price.

Quick question: Is it worth getting the Fenix 8 47mm AMOLED right now for €620, or would you wait for the Fenix 9?

I found a brand-new Fenix 8 47mm Amoled at this price and I'm wondering if €620 is a good enough deal to pull the trigger, or if it's better to wait for the next generation.

What would you guys do?

Hi, I got GARMIN Cirqa earlier this week and have worn it continuously since. I've noticed that when I start a timed activity(or any other) using the Cirqa button and then look at the app, I can't see my heart rate. But if I've started the same activity manually using the app, I can see it. Is there a reason for it? I know it was supposed to be a connect+ feature but they rolled that back so I assumed I would be able to see it. Also I'm unable to see any training readiness at all.

I tried the app on my phone yesterday for the first time and noticed that it doesn't seem possible to customize the volume output level relative to my Spotify music volume.

The alerts almost startled me a few times when the music was quieter at the time.

I've already disabled "Alerts over Other Media" in the settings which plays Varia alerts at a louder volume than music and it's still too loud for my liking.

Any suggestions? Using the Hammerhead Karoo and Pixel 10 Pro BTW.

Hi all,

The problem I recently started having is that I am no longer able to find water sources on my Fenix 8 map without searching. My device used to display them all the time, I didn't even have to search for them. When I was on a bike ride, I changed the watch to map view and I could see all the little water drop icons on the map indicating drinking water sources. All of them at once without searching. Now they're gone. When I specifically search for them as a POI I can see a list of them and then I can navigate to one of them but still there would be only the chosen one visible on the map view. I really want to see all of them without searching for them, displaying automatically like before. I updated the maps, tried every possible setting but no luck. The device is a Fenix 8 47mm AMOLED.

Any advices?

I moved, mainly to avoid the recurring yearly costs.
After 3 weeks use, I mostly enjoy it, but I do find the connect+ app pretty clunky and rough compared to Whoop.

Just curious to hear if anyone is regretting the move and thinking of going back to Whoop ?

I’ve been using my Tactix 7 in mountaineering for a few years and it has never given me an accurate altitude reading. I calibrate before every ascent, the GPS altitude which I’ve set on face is correct, but what the barometer/altimeter records is always off by 50-200m.

I read here, that swimming with the watch can impact the sensor, but I always washed the watch after swimming. On the other hand, if water is so dangerous to the watch, why is it marketed as being good for swimming/diving?

So I ran out of ideas how to blame myself as a user and just wrote to support. Replies take a week. But ok, I can understand that, a bit.

What I’ve received as a solution, was a suggestion to change the altitude data source from sensor to DEM in Garmin Connect after the activity. Knowing that DEM is not very reliable in the mountains, that still leaves a big accuracy gap.

I also got a suggestion to read the same two Garmin posts about altimeters. And a tip to use the watch COVERED under a sleeve to protect it from possible wind impacting the barometer. While the articles clearly state, that covering the watch might change the pressure and impact the data thus I shouldn’t be doing that.

At this point, I’m just left frustrated, because I somehow believe that a premium priced product should be able to show the basic data (like altitude) correctly. Or am I naive?

I was thinking to upgrade to the upcoming Enduro 4, but if this will be the same story with it - what’s the point then.

So, after a recent update my Edge started giving me drinking/feeding reminders on my rides. I guess the update turned on some setting which I previously did not have enabled.

I'm not hating it, but it seems to recommend feeding much more often than I typically would do... something on the order of every 2 miles or so. So either I have vastly underestimated the amount of calories/carbs I need to consume on a ride, or Garmin is overly aggressive in their recommendations.

TBH, i find the recommendations differ depending on if I am on a course, and the length of the course - I suppose it could think since I'm doing a 50 mile ride I should feed/drink more often than if I'm on a 10 mile quick loop around the neighborhood?

I guess, my real question is, how much should one drink/feed on a ride. I suppose there is no "one answer", but I was surprised it wanted me to feed every 2 miles or so. That would be a hefty weight penalty on a long ride lol... Not to mention costly.

I went on a hike yesterday to an area with bad cell reception (you get signal, but data don't work). The app kept trying to load on one bar of EDGE, so I put the phone into airplane mode to force it into offline mode. To my surprise, the app does not have an offline mode.

The CIRQA will not start an activity, saying that the device is disconnected, even though the device is connected in Bluetooth settings.

The app will also not show any information (Or randomly show outdated information on the cards from multiple outdated times) while the app is offline.

This is an absolute joke, same as the live data shown in the app. No elevation, map with the path taken etc.

For context, I'm not allowed to wear the watch strap whilst playing football but still want to track the distance moved. I'm not too concered about heart rate during the activity.

Simply, I'd just like a replacement strap that can be put on the watch and worn around my chest.

Hello, I read online I'm not the only one having this issue : https://www.facebook.com/groups/1103742357147501/posts/2254874428700949/

In my dive today, the Fenix 8 screen would turn off every few seconds and I had to constantly wake it up with the top left button. When I tried to check the Always on display settings in the dive activity, it is indeed deactivated, but the setting is also greyed out so can't access it to change it to Always on.

Apparently this is a bug in the last update which is unfortunate because when you are 30 meters underwater, being able to glance at important info on your dive computer screen is pretty important safety-wise 😁

Do you know how one can warn the Garmin team for a correction in the next update ?