I haven’t tried this new form feature but I previously had tried instantaneous pace fields in OW swims on my Forerunner 965. I found it useless, just absolutely all over the place. With your wrist entering the water constantly I just don’t think you get a frequent enough, accurate enough GPS lock to measure pace instantaneously.
It is close enough “on average” for a swim with a relatively straight path but the moment to moment was useless, so for that reason I basically only use lap average while swimming OW.
I haven’t tried this new form feature but I previously had tried instantaneous pace fields in OW swims on my Forerunner 965. I found it useless, just absolutely all over the place. With your wrist entering the water constantly I just don’t think you get a frequent enough, accurate enough GPS lock to measure pace instantaneously.
I will say it again, since there still seems to be misunderstanding: This is NOT about live pace perfectly capturing actual pace, or latency in that measurement, or fluctuations, or whatever. We all get it, open water GPS is hard.
This is about the available data fields at least being self-consistent, which they are currently not. Over a 3 minute period, the timer field moves forward linearly by 3:00, the distance field increases gradually by 200y, the average pace field shows “1:30” (give or take) the whole time. So far so good. But the “live” pace field shows “0:25” or thereabouts for the whole 3 minute stretch. That’s not a matter of GPS accuracy, there is some kind of incorrect calculation occurring which makes the displayed live pace totally inconsistent with the other (imperfect but usable) metrics.
Gotcha… Yeah my experience is that it will alternate between much slower than my actual pace and much faster than my alternate pace rather than consistently underestimate, so perhaps different.
Im sure there is some more complex smoothing involved than what your formula captures, for e.g. raw GPS readings are typically put through a number of filters and garmin is known to use swimming dead reckoning where the progress is interpolated based on velocity and heading (and could also incorporate stroke rate) during periods where GPS is unreliable, and they could perhaps use dead reckoning to interpolate the distance increase but wait to update instantaneous pace fields based on an actual satellite update. I do not think details of Garmin’s implementation are public so of course I’m only guessing but all modern GPS watches use a metric ton of similar post processing that can give unintuitive results in light of extremely poor GPS fixes.
I used to see this data on my strava pace charts (web version - it appears to be fixed now) and assumed that’s what it was as the data fits (for me at least)… I don’t use form or a wrist gps but an old 920XT (body only) under my cap so it always has a good gps connection - swims are pretty damn accurate distance wise and as I said it works to min/mile for me
It’s not supposed to represent minutes per mile. If that were the case, A) “pace” has different units than “average pace” and “lap pace” which doesn’t make sense, and B) that would be even more wrong than what I’m describing.
True pace: 1:40/100y
Displayed pace: 0:30
0:30/100y is roughly 3x my true pace.
0:30/mile = 120mph = 0:01.7/100y = 59x my true pace
Oh I see, you suspect it’s displaying mile pace in hh:mm format. I assumed you meant mm:ss format, sorry for misinterpreting.
That is a totally bizarre UX choice, if indeed that’s what’s going on. But I had to admit, that interpretation does seem consistent with my swim paces. And I suppose it’s perfectly usable once you understand what the number represents. Very interesting.
As expected, my ticket with Garmin went nowhere, they just told me to ensure I had good GPS connectivity.
Form support, in contrast, was very engaged. They have multiple users facing this issue, and are in contact with Garmin engineers trying to debug it. I mentioned the idea that the value might represent pace per mile in hh:mm format, and that Form would need to convert that before displaying. They said this doesn’t fit with all the cases they’ve seen, but it might be a good lead nonetheless. Hopefully it all gets sorted soon.