using pace alerts of a running watch...

My cat's name is mittens.

the pace feature fluctuates too much - far better to set the virtual partner and run/race off that.

Set up automatic 1 km laps.

Then keep track of your km splits. that's it.

the instantaneous pace is meaningless.

I haven't done pace alerts with the Garmin but I would tend to agree that the instant pace is going to fluxuate too much to be useful.

When I did Hood to Coast and I wanted to monitor effort in the dark I used HR alerts on the Polar I had at the time. In advance I did some check runs to get an idea of pace vs HR, and set a range wide enough it wouldn't go off constantly but still keep me alert while I'm running through the middle of who knows where in the dark.

I haven't checked if the Garmin has HR alerts but you may consider that. I would think the virtual partner could work, but a typical pace run may be two miles easy, 6-8 hard, etc, so you may get way behind your virtual partner before you start your hard segment.

If you're going to wear a Garmin during a marathon turn the GPS off. Program the watch to show "Last Lap" and "Avg Lap". Hit Start at the beginning and Lap at each course mile marker. Every time you hit Lap it will show you the time of your last mile, and it will readjust your average pace for the race. If you're trying to break 3 hours you'll want that Avg Lap to be at or below 6:52 as you near the end. You could also program a third field to "Laps". This will simply increase by 1 every time you hit lap, indicating what mile you're on. If you happen to miss one during the race you can just hit the Lap button twice at the next mile marker and your average lap will be back on track.

Using GPS to pace you during a marathon is useless unless you're using it as a very general guide, and if that's the case just go without it.

No reason to turn off the GPS for that, "Do this". You can do everything you've outlined with the GPS still on. Just turn off the auto-lap feature.

The "pace" readings are indeed quite unreliable. I often use the avg. pace of the current lap instead. If the laps are kept quite short (through auto-lap or manually) I find this gives me a good indication of the current pace most of the time.

My advice:

Don't use pace alerts

Leave GPS on and use 1 mile auto-lap

Have one of your screens be "pace -avg lap"

possibly have avg pace as a screen also

if have pace as a screen, play around with pace smoothing option

My 4 screens are as follows:

Time - Pace

Distance - Avg Pace

IIRC the 301 has a feature in the settings to 'smooth' the pace a little. Also I think mine fluctuated just a tad under long sections with trees. I'll still use it but sometimes my fastest pace is faster than I was going, but it averages out fine and I don't worry about the alert/alarm the one or two beeps.

Thank you all for the nice response! I talked with one of my friends who also uses the 305 and he told me it is most probably because of the arm swinging when running that the instantenous speed is not working well (he says, while biking, if he fixes the watch on the bike, the speed is quite accurate).

Anyways, I will do as most of you suggested. That is, put the pace of the previous lap in the display and maybe use the pace alert and manual lap counting.

ethiopian wrote:

Anyways, the alarm was getting off almost the whole time, and I was a bit surprised because I didnt feel I was running that slow.

If you are indeed ethiopian, then I'm going to sound like an ass for pointing this out probably, but I found this line particularly funny... at least the first half.

Back on topic. Yes, I agree with the other posters. The instantaneous speed and HR alarms suck.