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Preparing for Your Race With a Garmin Watch
Garmin watches feature a variety of ways to optimize your training and prepare for your race. Use training features such as self-guided Training Plans, adaptable Garmin Coach Training Plans, and Daily Suggested Workouts to help you reach your goals. Learn about Courses that can help you know what is ahead, or develop a pacing strategy with the PacePro™ feature. Customize data screens to see the data you want during your activity, and see the data in your Garmin Connect™ account after the race.
Select from the topics below to learn more about these features.
Garmin Connect offers a variety of Training Plans that provide a series of workouts that build upon each other to prepare you for your event. Self guided plans require that you stick to the structure set up by the plan, whereas Garmin Coach provides a more customized experience. A Garmin Coach plan will adapt to how your training is progressing. Select a link below to learn more about each of these types of plans.
Watches which have Daily Suggested Workouts analyze your recent activity and provide a workout aimed to help you maintain or improve your current fitness level. You can also create your own custom workouts and schedule them in a calendar ahead of time. Using the Race Day Widget, you can track how long until your next race, and it assists in managing your training volume and intensity. As you train, compatible devices can also show you a Training Status, which gives you general feedback about how your training is progressing. The links below offer further information about these features.
Courses allow your watch to direct you along a specific path, making them very helpful for running in new places or along a specific race route. You can create your own courses in Garmin Connect, search for courses created by other Garmin users, or upload other third-party course files. Many race organizations will even email a link to a course leading up to the event.
PacePro is a dynamic pacing feature for running type activities. It works by analyzing elevation changes along a course and suggesting the optimal pace for each section in order to meet your overall goal. This can help you optimize your pacing and run a more strategic race. You can learn more about how to use courses and the PacePro feature from the articles below.
The types of data that can be helpful to see while training are not always what you want to see on the day of the event. The data screens on the watch can be customized at any time to highlight the data you need. For more details, refer to the "Customizing the Data Screens" section of your owner's manual.
A summary of your activity will be displayed on the watch when you save it at the end of the race. Additional statistics are available when you sync your saved race activity to Garmin Connect.
Prior to your race, fully charge the watch and consider adjusting your settings and usage to maximize battery life. Using power intensive features like playing music, receiving smart notifications, and having the backlight on will greatly contribute to battery drain, so avoiding using those can help your watch last longer. You can also adjust other settings, like recording method or GPS constellation usage, to further extend the battery when needed.
Many newer watches have a Power Manager to control these settings all in one place and create Power Modes that can be used for specific activity profiles. For watches that do not feature a Power Manager, you can still adjust individual settings to maximize battery life. Check your owner's manual for the exact location of the settings and how to adjust them.
For additional information, see the Related content below.