Hi,
I've had a Forerunner 245 Music for 2.5 weeks now. On the first day, I did a 9min "Benchmark Run" (GC shows a pace of 6:59, 138 bpm avg HR). After a day or so, it started showing me a VO2 Max estimate of 54. I believe this to be way too high. I am male, in my thirties, I run *very* rarely. I can't really run longer than 10mins at that pace (I was battered after that benchmark run) and I can run for perhaps 30mins max at a much slower pace (perhaps around 8:00 or so). I do some sports sometimes but not endurance sports/cardio. I ran a 5k once 10 years ago in 31min and I was completely devastated afterwards. Since then, my running fitness has very likely *not* improved.
After a couple of days, I discovered the "Activity Class" setting on my GC Web profile, and I've set it to 3. And I've got very long legs, perhaps that's worth mentioning.
After the first week of using the 245, Training Status started showing me a 5k prediction of 22:04 (and the 10k/half-marathon predictions are about as ridiculously low).
I have not done (m)any longer runs, as I do not/can't run longer - I've done two Run-Walk-Run's from the Coach plan of around 22min and one other 25min run (not from the plan) and a few Drill Workouts from the Coach plan (but not sure Garmin uses these to estimate/improve VO2 Max?).
The thing now is this: I've done a few runs now but my VO2 Max is not going down. However the watch is consistently saying "Training Status Unproductive", that my Fitness is going down, during the runs it's giving me scores of -8, etc. So basically the watch thinks I am some kind of super athlete and that I am currently performing way below how I should be performing.
You can probably imagine how frustrating this must feel. No matter what I do or how hard I run, the watch is telling me I'm doing very badly. Of course I can just ignore the watch but I bought it as a gadget and "training utility" and this is just very demotivating. It also doesn't seem to correct the VO2 Max. So far it just went down from 54 to 53, in three weeks! How long do I have to wait and run until the watch realises I am not a super-athlete? You can imagine it would be much more motivating if my ability was estimated more correctly and I could actually work on *improving*, instead of just seeing how it goes downwards and downwards.
I don't really want to factory reset the watch and loose all my workouts and data from the first 3 weeks. Also I know that there's a field where I can input VO2 Max manually but I have no idea what I should be putting, this is exactly what I would want the watch to figure out for me.
Thanks for any ideas or suggestions!
