Garmin Swim workouts distance discrepancy

Equipment
1

Weird issue here, and one with Garmin, not TR. I’ve been creating swim workouts in Garmin connect to complete the tri build plans, and when I enter 200 yd repeats, the workout ends up being 219 yards on my watch. This only happens within repeats, I have confirmed that my watch is set to a 25 yd pool, and the workout was created with a 25 yd pool size as well.

This isn’t that big of a deal as I can count to 8 pretty reliably :slight_smile:, but it is somewhat odd. Anyone else seeing this issue using a garmin watch?

2

Your garmin thinks the pool is 25m and is converting it to yrds. is your garmin set to metric?

3

Yeah, that’s what I assumed was happening, but everything is set to yards, and it only does this in repeats. Example: Today’s swim was 4x200, with a 200 cooldown. The 4x200 ended up being 219, but the cooldown remained 200 yd. The 250 warmup was also unaffected.

4

can you screenshot and post the workout in garmin connect?

5

The mystery deepens! I made the workout on my phone in the connect app. The workout on the app says yards, but the workout on the online connect site says meters. Still doesn’t explain why this conversion only happened on the repeats and not on the warm up or cool down…

GSwim Snip
GSwim Snip1143×618 59.3 KB

Screenshot_20200304-145419_Connect
Screenshot_20200304-145419_Connect1080×2280 186 KB

6

…and when I hit the edit button on the online garmin connect workout to see if I could alter it there, the distance displayed is now in yards, not meters like the screenshot above. Confusion reigns.

7

weird

8

This is almost always a unit thing — the workout gets built in yards but the pool (or the watch profile) is set to meters, so the repeat distances get carried over 1:1 without converting. 100yd repeats read as 100m, and across a full set the total drifts noticeably.

Two fixes: make sure your pool length + workout units match before you export, and check that whatever built the workout actually converts on repeats rather than just copying the number. That was my headache with a couple of tools. I’ve been building swims in AquaPlan since it keeps the repeats unit-correct on the Garmin export, so the distance on the watch matches what I planned. Worth double-checking the unit setting on the discrepancy you’re seeing first though.