Real life battery duration in the wild

So here's real-life data for you from two day hike outings the last two days.

Started at 92%, hiked with the nav on (but not in use most of the time; checking it once in a while), OHR on, smart recording, GPS only, total time approximately 7 hours and power was at 55% when I finished. I recharged to ~80% and hiked today for 4 more hours, and as I write this the watch says 59%.

Note that I made NO particular attempt to be specifically careful with power consumption (e.g. shutting off bluetooth on the watch, etc) before starting. I also did NOT disable the backlight even though it was completely unnecessary while outside, and every time a button is pushed it does come on, so I suspect a fair bit of power got consumed lighting the screen unnecessarily since I did check stats and such on a fairly frequent basis.

From this I surmise that from that fact pattern I'm "completely safe" with an expectation of 15 hours of continual tracking and get into the "likely to NOT be safe" somewhere around 20 hours. This means that without further evidence I cannot trust that on a section hike I can get away with two days without charging if I am tracking performance on a continual basis.

I suspect I can materially extend this by (in particular) shutting off bluetooth and the backlight. Note that I had no external sensors operating; HR was off the wrist (not a chest strap) and I found it to be quite reasonable with no material dropoff problems.

Perhaps garmin should also revise the manual for the 5x: there is still written "up to 50 hrs in ultra trac"...

I will be doing more section-style hiking in the coming months and will make a better effort at reducing power consumption next time -- the goal being to see what a multi-day section hike limit actually is between recharges, with a reasonable margin of safety.

I'm pretty fast though even in crazy-elevation gain areas; ~15 miles in 7 hours with over 3,000' of elevation gain and a decent number of scrambles thrown in isn't too bad. If I get serious about it and the terrain is reasonable I can make 20 miles/day, although that's something that I usually won't do simply because I like to take some pictures and enjoy the scenery, and at a ~20mi/day pace I'm trying to get somewhere, not smell the flowers.

I used to hike with my F3 and there's not a *large* penalty -- but it exists. I could rationally charge every-other-day. However, the F3 didn't have OHR and I refuse to wear a strap when hiking. No, no and no. I also DID pay attention to power consumption if I was section hiking with my F3, where this was more of a "baseline" deal to figure out where I was with the new watch before doing anything to try to extend time (thus no ultra-trak, etc)

I think it's fair to expect, however, that if you are doing an Ultra or similar and need more than 24 hours of continuous recording you're going to run into trouble until and unless someone comes up with a cradle that allows charging while "in use." I will note that unlike the F3 if you plug the F5x into a charge-only source it does *not* switch to the charge screen even if you haven't put it in "storage" mode first, which surprised me - the watch face stayed active.