marklemcd wrote:
It's a bunch of crap marketed in a way to differentiate it from previous Garmin devices in order to extract dollars from your wallet. I'm a 40 year old man who has a max heart rate in the area of 180 +- a couple beats. My resting is 32. It currently says my vO2max is 67, that I could run a 15:29 5k or a 2:28:32 marathon. My PR's are 16:59 and 2:39:56 and are 8 years old.
Do the math. It's crap.
I think this highlights a common misconception about the Garmin/Firstbeat race predictions. It's not representative of what you could go out and run tomorrow, it's supposed to be representative of where your physiological limits may lie and the times you could achieve if you put in the appropriate training.
Sure, that's still a bit of a discrepancy between your 8-year old PRs and the predicted times, but do you not think that if you had no other distractions in life and had the benefit of an elite (masters) coaching system, that you could still reach somewhere near those times?
Matt Fitzgerald recently beat his 9-year-old marathon PB by over 2 mins at the age of 46!
https://www.finalsurge.com/...-Running-Bum-Success