Hello,
I live near a park where the instant pace on my Fenix 5 GPS is messed up.
I found an old gamin sdm4, I was thinking of trying to calibrate it to get distance/pace from the footpod, and keep the tracks from the Fenix 5 GPS.
In your experience, will this be accurate at a good variety of pace ? Zwift footpod for example was quite accurate at 4:30/km when calibrated, but anything more than +/- 2km/h variation became completely random (and infuriating when Zwift racing)
Is stryd the only option to be precise? I would prefer not to spend 270€ for a footpod when I have no use for power, but if garmin footpod is not reliable I’d rather spend some money than sessions trying to master it and just go directly to Stryd.*
Thank you so much for your help.
A fēnix 5 is many generations old, and a lot has changed. It might be worth trying one of the latest Garmin watches.
That said, I have a Stryd and its power and instantaneous pace readings are excellent. If you chose a pod, that is the no-brainer choice. I like it because it clips to your shoe so you don’t have to remember it. The next best is Garmin’s RD pod, but that one you have to remember to put on every time you run.
The other angle is that Garmin’s watch-based real-time power and grade adjusted pace on the latest watches totally rock. So, if you run in hilly areas, those might be better metrics than real time pace. (Garmin’s watch-based power is almost as good as the Stryd.)
Edit: I forgot to answer your direct question… yes, after you calibrate the Garmin pod, it should be pretty accurate. (It’s been forever since I used one.) It would not recognize stride length differences caused by intervals, uphills, downhills, etc… But it would be far better than GPS-based real-time pace.
Thank you very much for your answer. Yes, its old, but its working great, I certainly would love to have music/garmin pay options but that would be a waste of a perfectly working unit.
I’ll change the watch when its broken. I mostly run on flat areas, except once or twice a year on vacations.
Thanks for you answer about the accuracy of the footpod. Looks like its should be fine and worth spending a session calibrating.
For very short intervals, 100-200meters, accuracy is not really a problem, going by feel is fine for me
. Anything above 800m, I would like to have a +/- 5sec/ km acuracy.