How To Get The Most From Your GPS Running Watch

Guest [00:00:06]: Hi, I'm Joe Hikes, and welcome to the Run to the Top Podcast.

Finn Melanson [00:00:13]: Hello, fellow runners. I'm your host, Finn Milanson, and this is the Run to the Top podcast, the podcast dedicated to making you a better runner with each and every episode. We are created and produced by the expert team of coaches@runnersconnect.net where you can find the best running information on the internet, as well as training plans to fit every runner and every budget. GPS watches are an essential tool in the toolkit of runners everywhere. But have you ever stopped to consider whether you understand the ins and outs of the technology at your disposal? Have you ever wondered about the utility of watch metrics like running, dynamics, performance, condition or intensity minutes? Do you ever feel like you may have too many features and too much data to wade through? Here to help us understand how to get the most out of cutting edge GPS watches for our training, racing, and overall wellness is Joe Hikes, a product manager at Garmin. Specifically, we discuss how to organize and make sense of all the features a GPS watch has to offer. The basic and advanced metrics you can reliably track on your GPS watch tips and tricks for using GPS Watches and getting the most out of features like training, readiness and the features and benefits that differentiate Garmin GPS watches from the rest of the market, among many other discussion points. It's no secret Garmin's been in the running smartwatch game for a long time. So long, in fact, they just hit 20 years of Forerunner. To celebrate, Garmin's put select Forerunner watches on sale shop. Now@garmin.com, Timeline Nutrition has developed a groundbreaking product called Mitopure that revitalizes your mitochondria, which create energy in nearly every cell in your body. Head to Timelinenutrition.com to learn more. Joe Hikes. Welcome to the Run to the Top podcast. Thank you so much. The pleasure to have you here. I'm really excited to get into GPS technology, watch technology, the evolution of Garmin over the years, your role in the industry. And I think that latter part is a good place to start. I'd love to get a better understanding of your role there and maybe even before that just how you got into the industry and what excites you about a company like Garmin.

Guest [00:02:44]: Yeah, well, I guess kind of taking it in reverse order then how I got into the industry and got into this role. I actually started my career as an electrical engineer in various industries. Ended up in the communication industry, actually cellular communication industry. Worked for various cellular related companies. And when Garmin wanted to produce a smartphone back in the late two thousand s, two thousand and seven, eight nine, I came over to Garmin then actually to work on a phone project that Garmin subsequently decided not to not to chase that product segment anymore. But at that moment, there was an opportunity for product management that was opening up in our fitness business segment. And so I interviewed internally, and the director at the time, she really liked me, and she liked that she liked that I was a pretty dedicated recreational, I would say recreational runner. And so she liked that about me as much as anything else. And so I got the job, and that's how I got started doing product management on GPS, running watches. That would have been about 2010 or eleven, I think. Eleven, maybe ten now. Ten, because in 2010, I remember I set at that time, my PR marathon at Twin cities marathon shortly after I had started working in fitness. And so that's kind of how I remember that. And that was 2010.

Finn Melanson [00:04:34]: I feel like. Well, at least in my circles, it's a little known fact that at one point in time, garmin was interested in the phone segment.

Guest [00:04:44]: Yeah, a lot of people have forgotten that or never known it. It definitely was a challenge, and in some ways I wish I could forget it.

Finn Melanson [00:04:59]: Anyway, talk about your passion for this particular work, like, what gets you excited to work on fitness technology?

Guest [00:05:08]: Well, really, it is my hobby interest. I came to the role because I was a very active runner. I think I've run 25 marathons, which is not a lot compared to probably a lot of your listeners, but it's a few, and I've definitely put in the tens of thousands of lifetime miles. Now. I think that where I can say I'm a runner. I like the activity and the sport that we do. I really enjoy it a lot. And so the opportunity to do a job where I'm working in my hobby is pretty cool.

Finn Melanson [00:05:54]: Yeah, it makes me want to ask you, like, you're a runner, you're in the trenches, you're one of us. How much of what you're managing, how much of what you're helping build comes from ideas that you have out there on the runner? When you're looking at what you want to measure or how you want to get better and what you want to track and stuff like that, how much of it comes from your own experience versus customer segmentation, the surveys reaching out to your base, all that kind of stuff?

Guest [00:06:23]: Well, I think, first of all, I wouldn't want to take credit for even remotely all of the great ideas I think Garmin has had for running watch features over the last 20 years. But I would say that as a practice in general, within Garmin, we steer a lot of our own course, and it's based on the people with the passions that do the activities, whether that's in our running products, like me and others that I work with, we do get ideas absolutely out on the run. Like, wouldn't it be nice to see this, and wouldn't it be nice to know that that is the seed for a lot of our ideas, and we don't generally chase others we kind of steer our own course and I'm proud of that. So we're not usually catching up on running features with other people because we were usually first most of the time. So I would say that the majority of our ideas probably do come in some way or another internally as opposed to from user surveys or that sort of thing. And we do those activities, we do ask customers what they want, we do survey runners sometimes in different ways. So we want to be open minded to ideas from wherever they might come from. But I am proud that I think a lot of our innovation over the years has come from our own use of the products and our own dedication to the sport.

Finn Melanson [00:07:52]: I want to talk philosophically for a minute because I feel like we're in this era across the board when it comes to technology where people see pros and cons. I mean, you see it with social media. Like social media is this amazing connector of people. At the same time there are these drawbacks to it and I feel like the same argument could be made for GPS watches and running technology. So I think it'd be. I'd love to hear you talk about the pros and cons of the GPS Watch era that we're in right now, compared to the pre GPS Watch era where people didn't necessarily have all of the awesome data at their disposal to get better with. But also, some would say maybe not even the distractions or the self consciousness that comes with that as well. So what are your thoughts there?

Guest [00:08:40]: Well, the first thing that comes to the top of my mind is I think that there probably is I don't know if I want to call an issue or a problem, but the reality that I think that I know guys who don't really probably have the same ability to run by feel like I do. Like, having started running really with passion probably around 2001, and not even with a GPS watch until 2010, I feel like I learned how to I could judge approximately how far I ran, approximately how fast I ran. I could judge my own effort, sort of the internal GPS, the internal heart rate monitor, just the sense of yourself. And so I felt like I could line up for a race without any tools and I could run close to the best I could on that day without having a watch and a heart rate monitor. Tell me what it should be. I think if there is a downside, maybe people have in some cases have kind of lost track or lost the art of how to really kind of understand intuitively in their own body, like how far, how fast, how hard am I going kind of a thing.

Finn Melanson [00:09:58]: Right?

Guest [00:09:59]: And so I do think that's more of a challenge when we have the Crutch, we have all of the data accurate down to very small margins of error all the time. And it is addictive. It's definitely addictive and it's super convenient. I remember I used to have to, like, I used to draw out courses like on Google Maps back in the early two thousand s to figure out about how drive them in the car, to figure out how far they were. And now you don't care, you just go run and the watch will tell you how far you went. So I think if there's a downside, that's probably the first thing that jumps to my mind. But I think that the upsides are so many and that's why people have adopted the technology so widely and so deeply across the sport and other sports as well, GPS for cycling and so on. But there are many, many upsides. And you know what? At the end of the day, we don't make you take your watch with you, right? You can leave it at home and learn how to run by feel if you want to.

Finn Melanson [00:11:13]: And I do think there's a whole constellation of factors at play. Like it's not just the watch that is making runners lose touch with intuition. I think there's also strava and there's social media and there's all sorts of things that make people want to stay plugged in all the time. But do you think it's okay to just to conclude the philosophical part of all this, do you think generally it's okay for runners to lose touch with that intuition? Like can technology take the wheel and you become as good or even better a runner and enjoying the process throughout?

Guest [00:11:50]: Well, I think a lot of people do. I think a lot of people do embrace the technology 100%. They use it all the time. Some of us like crusty old guys might say it's a crutch, but hey, man, if they're running faster and they're enjoying it and having fun, then how do you say that's wrong?

Finn Melanson [00:12:09]: Well, a couple of other questions. So I have a chorus watch. I don't have a garmin quite yet, but I'm using a chorus and there's just so many features on the watch that I don't use. And one of the questions I wrote here is just around this overabundance of data. And again, I'm not trying to be negative here, I just think there's a lot of questions that the audience has when it comes to why we build the watches, the index of features and how they're useful and how they interact. Can you talk about what goes into the features on a watch and the purpose of everything? And do we have too much, do we have too little like the menu of stuff? How do you think about that?

Guest [00:12:47]: Yeah, well, first of all, I'm really sorry that you have a chorus left to get you improved.

Finn Melanson [00:12:52]: I got to be honest.

Guest [00:12:53]: Yeah, I appreciate your honesty and I really feel sorry for you. But in answer to your question, I think that you're absolutely right. There's a wide array of features and some of the features can seem very complicated. Some of them can even seem intimidating, even though we make our best efforts, I think, most of the time to make them simplified and actionable for the user and so forth. But my advice to people is typically on some of this is you don't have to use all that's there, but you might pay attention to a certain aspect for a certain season, for example. So, like, maybe at one point in your training, you really want to pay close attention to the Garmin training status feature as you're gearing up for race season or something like that. But at another season, you may not want to do that at all. Let's just focus on general health. And so that would be like sleep tracking and heart rate variability and things of that nature. You still get to track your daily miles and your overall fitness and so forth. But the fitness tracking and from the sense of like a training status and training progress becomes less of a priority at other times. So I would say don't use everything all the time. Use what serves you at the time that is appropriate.

Finn Melanson [00:14:34]: When you think about all of the features that do exist on the watch, does it more come from a top down approach where people at Garmin like yourself will estimate what users want and need and build accordingly? Or does it come more bottoms up, like you get requests from out in the field and you consider and then you're like, okay, yeah, let's incorporate that.

Guest [00:14:56]: I'm not quite sure how to answer that because I think it's a mix. I think different ideas may come from different directions sometimes. You know, for example, the we have a newer feature, relatively newer, called training readiness and, and the, the goal of that feature is to kind of tell you how ready your body is to get the most benefit from your workout that day. And it has roots in academic research regarding timing workouts by heart rate variability. So there's been, I don't remember the paper, I can't quote it chapter and verse or anything like that, but the idea was certain athletes, they timed their hard workouts according to certain markers in their heart rate variability. Other athletes, they trained them just by rigid schedule. And then they found that those that trained by timing their workout according to heart rate variability showed greater progress than the ones who just followed their workouts based on calendar schedule. So that was the seed of an original idea of like, well, is this something we could productize for customers and to where we could tell them, well, today is a great day. If you did your workout today, your body is going to reap the biggest harvest. So that's an example of where maybe we got an idea kind of from academic literature and thought, well, what can we do with that idea in a top down way? Like if we were to design it scientifically and also try to make it as user friendly as possible, what would that look like? So that's probably an example of we think that there could be a legitimate user need out there. People do want to know. I think if I did my workout on Tuesday instead of Wednesday, it's going to make me faster even if I do the same workout, right? So we're trying to answer a legitimate user question that could have bubbled up from below but we're going to answer it top down in the sense of we're going to apply all the science that we can and we're going to try to put this together in the most rational way that we possibly can do it.

Finn Melanson [00:17:11]: You mentioned the training readiness feature, which I think I want to go more in depth on in a moment, but I think there's probably a lot of people out there in the audience, listeners, viewers that have a garmin watch and maybe they aren't using it to the fullest extent that they could. And they're curious about what else is on there that they could use. When you survey your customers or you just see the data based on the channels you have, what do you see as the most popular features? What are the most popular features out there that might be relatively new to some listeners of the show?

Guest [00:17:44]: Well to be honest, that feature training readiness was pretty super popular right out the gate and it's always a little nerve wracking as the product manager when you launch a new feature because it's like your baby's going out there into the world and are people going to think it's beautiful or not? And you don't know for sure how it's going to be received, but I think it's been quite popular and well received, not just for running training but I think that just in general, people kind of have seen that as a cool metric for how I'm doing in this particular day kind of a thing. So maybe using it in a little different way than what we kind of maybe originally intended it for. But yeah, I think that's a great example of a popular feature. I think that's very new. The heart rate variability status I think is a popular feature as well and I think that it's not really super well understood yet, but people want to know more about it and that's always a good thing when people are curious about a feature and what does it mean? Well garmin, how do you measure it, why do you measure it that way? So when you get feedback along those lines, it's encouraging that people are engaged with the feature.

Finn Melanson [00:19:06]: I think they'd also be curious to know how you're engaging with the watch, like what are your favorite features, what are you looking to on a day to day basis beyond just, like, mileage splits, elevation gains, stuff like that.

Guest [00:19:17]: Yeah, and I'm glad you said that too because I got asked this question recently like, what's the number one thing you really like about your GPS running watch? And I said, well, I like mile splits. Who doesn't like to know how fast they ran the last mile? We've been doing that for 20 years, but it's still cool. But honestly, for me personally, since you ask a semi personal question I'm in a little bit of a phase of kind of running for health this year. More than running for goals. I've always run for goals my whole life. But this last year, I've been running just kind of more for health. And so for me personally, I've been focusing more on some of the other stuff that our watches do like the sleep tracking, the HRV status. Just kind of the overall picture of, like, how am I doing as a human being? A little less than how I'm doing as a runner because that's just been kind of the season that I've been in personally.

Finn Melanson [00:20:26]: As we mentioned before, Garmin is celebrating 20 years of Forerunner. The new Forerunner 965 and the Forerunner 265 series are the best of the best. Both offer a bright OLED touch screen display premium running features including training, readiness score so you know when you are primed to reap the rewards of your workout and daily suggested workouts to help you meet your goals. Plus, both include all the features you've come to expect from Garmin like sleep score, up to 23 days of battery life top of the line GPS recovery insights and more. Shop the new Forerunner lineup now@garmin.com. And be sure to check out the sale on select Forerunner watches with the sleep tracking component. I'm interested. Are you able to make any comparisons to other products on the market like URA and Whoop? Like, I know the Aura Ring, for example, is one of those very specific sleep tracking devices. I'm not totally familiar with it, but could you get a lot of the same data and measurements and monitoring on a Garmin watch as you could with those other products out in the market?

Guest [00:21:37]: The answer is absolutely yes. And yes. I'm familiar with both those products and have used both of those products. In fact, I'm using if I can say it I think it's not illegal somehow. Stephanie, I'm using Whoop right now, actually because I'm kind of doing a reassessment of of their product and and and what what they do and how well they do it. So I'm I'm actually doing that right now, and so but I do yeah, but, yes, I feel like Garmin, we do pretty much all the same thing as those products. I guess I can't answer for sure in every little tiny feature area. But fundamentally, I think what we do is we can give you anything that those products can give you. And also with a display and with the GPS and with accurate run distance tracking and accurate training information and vo. Two max measurements and all the other stuff that we can do in addition to the sleep monitoring and things like that, that those products URA and whoop do.

Finn Melanson [00:22:53]: Yeah, the sleep tracking component is new to me and maybe hopefully new to folks in the audience and that's a further use case. Any other tips and tricks for how to use the watch or what opportunities the watch affords that might not be readily apparent to the audience?

Guest [00:23:11]: Well, for one thing, I love some of the other stuff that we do, frankly. We have a thing called garmin pay. It's like Apple Pay and subdivision. So it's Garmin Pay. In fact it works anywhere in the world that Apple Pay works. So it's not like it only works in Kansas City. But I use my watch to buy stuff all over France and Switzerland when I went there in February with my son and my daughter. And it's just super convenient to be able to make payments bang with the watch all over the place. And so we have a lot of just smartwatch features I think that people don't realize that Garmin has that are pretty cool, just daily use, I think. Also we recently introduced these features called Race Widget. We call it race widget. We really need to come up with a better marketing name for it than that, probably. But the idea is you can put your target race on your Garmin Connect calendar and that gets pushed to your watch. And then you get a little widget on your watch for that race and it gives you a little countdown timer and it gives you the weather forecast for the race, day and time. And it gives you if the course is there, it can give you a more detailed finish time prediction based on your fitness level and the course. So the Race Widget thing is kind of cool. And on top of that, the watch can also, if it knows about the race you're going to do, it will suggest workouts for you to do if you, let's say, you don't have a training plan or you don't know. Many users are not sure what to do if they sign up for a half marathon. What do I do? Well, if you tell us about the race, the Garmin watch, the owner will actually train you towards it. So that's some cool stuff that we do. Those are also relatively newer features. The morning report thing. We put a morning report in the watches last year, or just last year. Yeah, and that's kind of a neat thing because you just wake up in the morning and you just get this quick little summary of like how is your sleep, what's your workout for the day? What's the weather this morning? Just bing, bing, bing go down through your scroll through and kind of get your take on the day before you even roll out of bed. There's really a ton of stuff the watches do so much more, infinitely more than they did in 2010 when I started this.

Finn Melanson [00:25:45]: I got to ask you more about this suggested workouts feature, because, again, I was unaware. You got to explain how this works. So do you just input like a race type race distance and maybe like a suggested or a goal finishing time, and it works backward from that. What variables do you have to give it in order for it to give you the most precise and accurate and helpful training advice to your personal situation?

Guest [00:26:09]: Yeah, you pretty much describe it. That's right. I mean, you would go to your Garmin Connect calendar and go to the date and then enter some information about the race distance, location, time of day, that kind of stuff. And then if you have a course or create a course for that race in Garmin Connect, that makes it even better, actually, if that gets attached to the event, to the race event, and then that race event will automatically sync to your watch. And yes, what you said was the automatic coaching or the automatic adaptive coaching, whatever terminology you want to use, it works backwards based on the distance of the race. Is it a half marathon, a ten k a marathon, whatever, how far out it is, 6812, 1818 weeks, whatever. It'll actually periodize, the suggested workouts. So they will fall into sort of a baseball peak taper kind of a structure. It's all personalized. So it's all like based on it's looking at your fitness indicators and your training history. So it's not going to take you from if you've been training 20 miles a week, it's not going to jump you on week one to 50 miles a week. It's not going to do that.

Finn Melanson [00:27:43]: This is also fascinating to me, and I guess this is more of a business question because I want to ask you about how Garmin differentiates itself from the rest of the market. But then when I think about that question, it's like you mentioned all these different categories of life that this watch works in, like payments, sleep, real time, fitness coaching. And that's a lot of areas. And so do you compare yourself or do you try to differentiate yourself more against a Polar or a chorus? Or are you thinking more like Apple Watch? Because Apple Watch kind of has so many lifestyle categories that it functions in.

Guest [00:28:20]: I would say the honest answer is we in the Forerunner product line, we compare ourselves primarily to other similar built for purpose watches, built for athletic training watches. So we probably compare ourselves primarily to, like, the corrosives Polars of the world than we do to Apple. However, that being said, we don't want customers to have to make sacrifices and feel like they're missing out by not having an Apple Watch, for example. So things like payments and music and sleep tracking and things like third party applications. Our watches run third party applications, right. So smartwatchy stuff like that, that we don't want you to feel like, well, if I buy a foreigner, I've got to give up some of that cool stuff I could get with an Apple Watch. We want you to have both. Right. So, while still being built laser focused for purpose for runners and triathletes.

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Guest [00:30:47]: Yeah, some of the biggest advancements that come to my mind are things like built in optical heart rate measurement, which goes back to, I don't know, 2013 or 14. Somewhere back in there, that was a big sort of shift. Now all of our watches pretty much have a built in heart rate monitor in the back of the watch. I think the addition of music onboard music playing capability was a pretty big deal, especially with the integration, because when we first launched it, it wasn't just a dumb MP3 player, which is nice. It's nice to have a dumb MP3 player that you don't have to have a separate piece of hardware. But the integration with third party music sources like Spotify, that was, I think, really a big deal, and a lot of people really seem to appreciate that feature. And on top of that, the addition of music and playing, the ability to connect with Bluetooth to headphones or earbuds opened up other mission focused capability. So, for example, our audio prompts feature, which I think is, in my opinion, still to this day. Probably a huge competitive advantage if more people knew it was there and used it. Because when I'm running just a daily run or even running a workout on the track or whatever, and I've got my music going, and I hit the lap button on the track, or I cross a mile marker on the road or whatever the case may be, and the watch just tells me what the data is, right? It just mutes the music stream, and it tells me, mile 5721, I don't even have to look at the watch. And so that's just pretty cool. Other things, of course, you always have to keep up with just or try your best to keep up with basic hardware. So things like color displays, I remember years ago, and this was more in the time frame of, like, when we brought in optical heart rate. So this is way back, like seven, eight, nine years ago. But the color displays, I remember at the time, my old boss told me when we proposed, like, hey, let's do a color display on the watch. She said, you don't need anything but black and white for a running watch, Joe. And I said, that's true. You don't really need anything but monochrome, but it's the way the world is going. You got to go with where the world is going, which she agreed with. And we built color display watches, so there's just tons of stuff like that that you have to just keep up with as well.

Finn Melanson [00:33:47]: A couple of other categories I want to discuss. The first one is reliability, and this is not an indictment on Gartman. I think that when people talk about reliability, it spans across any type of watch company. But what is your response when you hear somebody say, okay, like, these features, like heart rate variability, risk based heart rate, this alert that I'm being unproductive or that I'm overreaching, these are all amazing, but when I look into the data, it seems like it's a little bit off. What's your typical response to that? And what does Garmin promise when it comes to these categories of data?

Guest [00:34:27]: Yeah, well, my typical response is usually like, ouch. Gosh, I wish we had done better, right? I mean, I wish we didn't have mistakes or errors of measurement or things like that. And we always want to improve and do better for our customers. There are limitations to the technology, just like there's limitations to GPS pace, accuracy. We can make it pretty good, but we can't make it perfect. And we can like, optical heart rate sensing, we can make it pretty good, but we can't make it perfect. And there are certain use cases where it's more difficult to get an accurate signal, for example. But it's always an area of focus, like, can we make it better? What can we do in the next generation to try to improve it? First of all, my first response is, gosh, that hurts. Let's try to do better. I think also, for example, the training status feature that you referred to, like when people find themselves in a state, what we were calling a state of unproductive, right? And basically what we were trying to communicate with that state was, look, it looks like you're training hard, but your fitness is not going the right way with your hard training. So it looks like overall, your training is unproductive. We weren't trying to say you're unproductive or you're a lazy slob or anything like that, but that was what the data was seeming to suggest. Now that's an example though, where we listen to customer feedback and like, hey, people, they hate this unproductive thing. I mean, it may be true, but they don't want the truth. They really hate it. We've actually altered the algorithm in response to customer feedback and we introduced now that we have heart rate variability. Also, they gave us another piece of data to work from that helps to better sort of tease out an accurate training status. So the way the algorithm works now, people should generally see a lot much lower occurrence of unproductive training status. So that's an example where I feel like we definitely heard the crowd and the masses and we made changes and we introduced additional data to try to improve the quality of the future.

Finn Melanson [00:37:02]: I'll be the first to admit I was a little skeptical about how much a green supplement like AG One could actually help me. I generally eat healthy, try to get in whole fruits and veggies, and know that oftentimes supplements aren't as well absorbed as real food. But I made it a big goal of mine to get healthier overall after the 2020 quarantine. So I dug into the research about how much greens could help and what was the best on the market. All of the research pointed to AG One being the most comprehensive and well dosed greens supplement on the market. In fact, one of the things that I like most about AG One is they list all of their ingredients and quantities. They don't hide behind proprietary blends, which is almost always a quick way to know if a supplement is a scam. The sheer number of ingredients is overwhelming at first, but once you dig deeper, you can see that this is actually what makes it the best product on the market. They're also NSF certified, which means they go through rigorous testing to prove that the contents of the product match what is on the label. I also did a lot of research on how AG One are made. I mean, how do they squeeze that many ingredients into a single scoop and does that diminish the nutritional value? Well, turns out they actually dry or dehydrate the ingredients and crush them into a powder. This results in almost zero nutritional loss. If you've been skeptical about using a greens product and how effective it could be. I really encourage you to give AG One a try for 30 days. You can even get a free year's supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs if you start now, just head to Athleticgreens.com RTT to give them a try. Yeah, I think one follow up question I have on that, I would say the majority of listeners and viewers of this show are roadrunners. Like, they're getting ready for a five k, ten k half marathon marathon. There are some trail runners in the audience. I count myself as primarily a trail runner. Would you say that the data is harder to get accurate on a trail surface, especially when you're trying to gauge things like effort and power output and stuff like that?

Guest [00:39:05]: Absolutely, yeah, hands down. No doubt it's harder to give accurate as accurate a data to trail runners. Differences in surface are really huge, as, you know, better than I do, because I'm really mostly a road runner. But differences in surface quality can affect how hard you're having to work to go the same pace, right. And that can have a direct reflection on how we estimate your Vo Two max and your performance capability. Not to mention, sometimes GPS is just harder on trails with a heavy tree cover or whatever, or in canyons or wherever you might be running. So it's a harder problem, the trail running thing. I'm definitely not going to try to sugarcoat that. Now. We have made some changes, though, over the years to try to mitigate or improve our accuracy for trail runners. So, for example, we have a little bit of a trade secret thing that we've added to the Vo two max measurement. When we think based on other parameters that you're running on a trail and we think we can kind of estimate the impact of trail difficulty and how that might have be affecting our measurement of your aerobic capability. So it's a tricky problem, but it's not one we're ignoring. But, yes, you're right, it's harder to give good data to trail runners.

Finn Melanson [00:40:34]: I think before we close up here, I have sort of one more category of questions, and I think it's all just looking towards the future. I think it's fun to look towards the future, always. When we talk about technology, what's exciting you most about the future of this watch technology and specifically what you're working on at Garmin? I'm sure there's a lot of stuff that you probably can't talk about because you are in a market and there's competition, but can you speak maybe broadly first about what's exciting you?

Guest [00:41:04]: Well, I think that it always amazes me that there's always new ideas to try. There's always new ideas for features and for capabilities, for the watches that we didn't envision five years ago. There just always are. And I look back over the last 20 years, even though I wasn't working on Forerunners in 2003, by the way, this year is like the 20th anniversary of Garmin forerunner. So we are definitely the OG, right? Anyway, proud of that. But we look back over that 20 years and like the original GPS running watch, which that's like all it did, right? You couldn't couldn't even tell time. You couldn't wear it as a watch to tell time just walking around during your normal day. It was built as an appliance for running as opposed to a watch that does the running features. And to compare to now the watches that we have that do all the things we've talked about, it's just an amazing leap. So if you look ahead, if you extrapolate that ten or 20 years, I think our imagination is really the limit because I think, for example, I bet ten years from now, maybe less, like, all running watches will be fully connected wearables, right? I mean, we've made one already. Our 945 LTE product is autonomously connected without a phone, at least for some key athletic use cases. Now, they had limitations that I think that were unfortunate, but nevertheless, it did some cool stuff without needing a phone that was automatically connected. I think things like that, it's only a matter of time until that's like everywhere and you don't need a phone to lug around with you with your watch for some of the features to work. I think who knows what's going to happen with AI and training in the next several years. I don't know.

Finn Melanson [00:43:18]: Maybe you just kind of answer my last question there a little bit. But if you had to look ahead to the year 2030, so six or seven years down the line, what is one major way, in your opinion? Totally just a prediction. What is one major way that GPS training watches look markedly different than they do now? What's like one feature or one capability of it that you think is going to be there?

Guest [00:43:46]: Well, I really hope that by then our watches really are like for the runner especially are fully phone free and able to do everything you want them to do when you're out on your run, including text your or voice message your wife to say, I'm going to be home late. That's what I hope to see.

Finn Melanson [00:44:13]: You know what I was thinking? I don't know if you've played around with Chat GPT at all since it came out about a year ago, but I wonder if you could give a command into your watch like, take me on this type of run.

Guest [00:44:28]: And just.

Finn Melanson [00:44:29]: Kind of set it and forget it and it just guides you the rest of the way.

Guest [00:44:34]: Who knows?

Finn Melanson [00:44:37]: It's fun to forecast. But anyways, Joe, it's been such a pleasure to have you on the podcast. Thanks for giving us the rundown on Garmin products and wash technology and use cases and tips and tricks. It's been awesome. Do you have any final thoughts or calls to action for listeners and viewers before we go.

Guest [00:44:57]: Yeah. I think my final call to action would be if you have a chorus, ditch that thing and get a real running watch.

Finn Melanson [00:45:06]: I know. I got to make a switch. I appreciate it.

Guest [00:45:10]: No problem.

Finn Melanson [00:45:25]: It thanks for listening to the Run to the Top podcast. I'm your host. Finn milanson. As always, our mission here is to help you become a better runner with every episode. Please consider connecting with me on Instagram at Wasatch, Finn and the rest of our team at Runners Connect. Also consider supporting our show for free with a rating on the Spotify and Apple podcast players. Lastly, if you love the show and want bonus content, behind the scenes experiences with our guests and premier access to contests and giveaways, then subscribe to our newsletter by going to RunnersConnect. Net podcast. Until next time, happy trading.