Garmin adds colors for pace, heart rate & elevation on routes
Garmin has quietly slapped on some new functionality to the web dashboard and Connect app. It color codes your routes for heart rate, pace and elevation. This has been top of the wish list of many Garmin device owners for a while now.
The company has not said anything officially. But users have started noticing the addition in the past couple of days – however, not at the same time. This seems to be a progressive rollout so if you are not seeing it yet you will need to exercise some patience. Here in London the functionality is live.
Color coding for routes
Apple and some other wearable brands have had the feature for a while. Be we really like Garmin’s take on the concept.
Essential reading:Â Top fitness trackers and health gadgets
After the upgrade an activity on the map looks different then before. Here’s a screen-shot for a 5K run on the web platform. This is an illustration for pace.
You can see a gradient color scale along the way indicating whether you are increasing or decreasing in pace. Blue is slower, Red is faster. One can easily estimate when during the run each zone occurred.
If you click on the top left of the map there’s a new “layers” icon. This enables you to switch between heart rate, pace and elevation.
Here’s an illustration of elevation for the same run. The Blue in this case indicates downhill (lower altitude), Red uphill (higher altitude).
This is a nice addition which will be useful for those who like analyzing their performance in detail. It translates the data in a more meaningful way. In addition to the web app, the feature has also made its way to the Garmin Connect app.
Here’s what it looks like on an iPhone.
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To what is it compared. My overall pace or the pace for the current track?
The overall pace for that particular run.
I think it is compared to some longer term average, as otherwise all colors should be present. I made runs all in blue and others all in green, orange, red.
is it compared to your virtual partner? My partner is set to a fairly slow pace (haven’t updated it in years) and I always ‘pass’ the partner in the first half mile. Consequently my map only ever shows orange yellow and red. I get green only on my slowest warm downs (near the partner pace)
I noticed mine only shows the new gradient colors on the Activities that were preprogrammed with my Instinct Tactical watch. The Activities that I created still show the map in the old way, with a simple red line.
Is there a feature I need to turn on in my custom Activities?
Not that I’m aware of. My Forerunner 935 started showing the gradients as soon as the feature was enabled by Garmin.
Is there a way to turn it off & just show the old way? I feel judged. LOL
The first time I noticed it I had all the colours on my run. Subsequently I have only blue. My pace has actually improved so I have no idea what it is judging me against.
This is the same for me, only blue and deeper blue. I feel depressed deapite running faster 😉 This feature is cool, I would allow the user to set his own interval for slow and fast.
I have recently noticed, when I zoomed my track to the maximum that I have – at the start of my run – a couple of very short deep red sections of my run. Those are at the beginning of the track and seem to be the adjustments done by GPS, not actual running speeds. These totally disrupt the overall color scheme of my run, which is subsequently only blue, despite there rounds I completed faster that was the oveall average of the run. This need to be fixed by garmin.