Some Simple Questions
Bear Giles | May 7, 2013Some simple questions for the developers of Garmin Training Center, the bundled software with Garmin GPS sports watches.
Why does your graph include paces of -15 or even -30 minutes/mile?
You can NEVER have a negative pace. It’s a positive pace going in the opposite direction. All this does is compress the range of the meaningful information, often to the point where it’s unusable.
Why does your graph include paces of more than 60 minutes/mile?
This one is a little more ambiguous. I’ve never seen my pace slower than 60 minutes/mile when I have it set to auto-pause. (I’m not actually going that slowly, it’s when I’m stopped at traffic lights or because my dog is doing dog stuff.) So for me anything beyond that, again, compresses the useful data to where it’s unusable.
I suppose it’s possible that you can see a slower pace if the watch isn’t set to auto-pause… but if someone is going that slowly does a chart even make sense? Isn’t this in the realm of the drift we see from the nature of the GPS system itself?
Why does your graph of heart rates include 250 beats-per-minute?
Can someone have a HR over 200 BPM?
Outside of a hospital?
Okay, I’ll grant that a teenager with a naturally high heart rate range could have a HR just over 200. But NOBODY is going to have a HR over 250 BPM. So why does the chart include that wasted space?
The bigger lesson
The technical lesson, of course, is that auto-ranging needs to be used intelligently. A lot of the time there are natural constraints on the meaningful range, be them physical, legal, or anything else. If you ignore that you can seriously compromise the usefulness of your charts.
This application has had this problem for a very long time and it’s very visible to anyone who uses it. Why wasn’t it fixed years ago? Is it a case where the only thing worse than learning your website has been down for a day is realizing that your website has been down for a day and nobody noticed? Is the app so bad that nobody ever uses it?
For what it’s worth this is a big reason why I stopped using Training Center a few years ago. I only noticed this because I recently bought a newer watch and that required a newer version of Training Center (to download data from the watch) and it still has the same problem.