This for me would be the killer feature that would make trade immediately any watch that I would own for the one that would suddenly offer such feature that I need. That's because, all watches currently monitor progress with the GPS kilometers ran. When you are training that's ok because you are monitoring the elapse and the remain is not so important.
But in a Marathon, the actual progress is vital. And the only way to have this is to have a watch that loads the route(or course) on the watch and follow the real progress over the real route.
This is very useful because at every marathon, my watch always indicates 43-44 km run when I cross the finish line. Said otherwise, I always hit the 42.195 mark, a couple of kilometeres before the finish line. So you can imagine that if you are trying to qualify for Boston and that your watch guides you to the finish line right on the time limit...... 2 km before the actual finish line........ you're screwed!!!!!
So when I saw and read on the courses feature off the forerunner 630, I was sure I had found the Holy Grail of the watches!...... until this weekend , when I gave it a trial.
- I built a course
- I downloaded it to my watch
- I selected Menu>Run>Training>Race an acticity>Downloaded
- Selected my course
- Started running
After a couple of km, I did THE test!!!! I suddenly veered 90 degrees to the right at the same pace.
The real, working feature on Endomondo started to show the remaining kilometers to increase instead of decrease because it knew that I was running away from my destination
But my Forerunner 630 continued to show kilometers decreasing, which made no sense because I was running away from my target!!!!
It even made me ask myself the question: "OK, you load a route but it does not follow your path compared to the route. What the heck does it allow us to load a route then!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
