Endurance score drops 500 point

• Hi. The 17 KM trail run were in zones 3 and 4 in a 50/50 relation. The 10K were mostly run in zone 3 with less than 10 minutes in zone 4. The systematic drop only happened after the update. My running habits are 20 - 30 K per week since many years ago. I have never experienced this drop since the feature was introduced until 18.14 that came last week. As of my training load I have observed that running 5 times 5K in a week and in zone 3, gives me high load and running twice 17 + 10 in a week combined in zones 3 and 4 deliveres me low load. The days I don't train, the training load drop very much and when I train it goes up very slowly. That was not so when I purchased the watch more than two years ago. I am sure about. I rarely do anaerobic exercise. I am almost 60 years old and my family needs me :-) Also my watch keep updating my threshold at 152 BPM and my Max HR at 182 BPM. My rest HR is in betwen 45-50. That is OK, but 182 BPM at my age, seems weirdly too high. I use external HR PRO from Garmin. I believe something went wrong with the metrics upon the updates. I am curios to see what will happen with the Vo2 max metric (44 currently) as from October the 10th on, that I will be oficially 60. Average estimation tables from 50 to 59 and from 60 to 65 are not the same.

I forgot to say that high aerobic and low aerobic are always in range. Anaerobic is not as I have already stated. But it has been so since more than a year and the drop in endurance score only happened after last week in version 18:14.

Thanks for your help Nick.

My HVR has stayed stable in the last months. Nothing negative to remark on average HR and speed in the runs of at least since 6 months ago. Always either stable or improving. My Vo2 improved in the last 6 months. I have a stable sleep pattern of 8 hours per day and some naps. I haven't got any pound of weight in the last weeks neither. 

I can tell you something. As a telecom engineer I have seen many times during my 43 years career a software update to break something. Moreover you can have a look at the list of bugs that Garmin fixes with every new software. So, pretending the software is perfect and there is always a user related explanation, looks to me like quite out of reality. Everything was going well until exactly last Wednesday when I made the software update to 18.14. 

Hope Garmin will detect it and solve it or tell me how can I roll back to the previous version.

So I deduce that you are right.

I remained at 15.77 because I had read about the numerous malfunctions in subsequent updates and also there were no new functions that justified the installation.

If you want to try to go back to 15.77 I leave you the link, but I must warn you that you could get errors because I do not know if the firmware downgrades the sensors (you could get the 15.77 firmware but the GPS version of 18.14) but, I repeat, I do not know. So if you decide to try to do this downgrade it would be very important a confirm the software versions installed after the downgrade (gps, touch screen, etc.).

forums.garmin.com/.../firmware-15-77-is-here-downgrade

Many thanks Nick. I appreciate it a lot. Yesterday I escalated the problem.to support. Before getting into the adventure of downgrading I would like to wait for support to reply to me. I will take then a decision on the basis of their intervention. I keep you informed in any case.  

Hi Nick. Just for information.

Yesterday I ran another 10K@10 km/h with HR in Z3 on flat and Z4 for the hills up. My endurance score went again down.This morning again down. After a nice sleep I further lost 5 points. 

I can confirm a constant dropping trend since last Wednesday, and that independant of what I did. 

Garmin support did not contact me yet. Which is a good sign. When they get back too fast it is normally to: "blablabla is your fault or your watch requires service" This has happened to me twice with the Belgian support team by the way said.

But the true is all this has happened after the upgrade. Coincidential? I don't know...

Reading back our discussion I noticed that we were mostly discussing about Performance Score. But actually the problem is Endurance Score drops. They are as reated as independat they can be.

According to Garmin (and to my own experience) endurance is built with mostly long and frequent runs in Z2 and a bit of Z3 at most. What they call "Base"

Example. My son is 19 years old. He is very fit from Gym doing cardio and weights. He can run 1 KM in two and a half minutes less than I can do. And he will not touch Z4. I will if I force to my max performace. When we go for a long run or trail run, he cannot endurance a Half Marathon at 9Km/h without stopping several times. I usually do that non stop and twice a year. He cannot even endure 10K at 10km/h which is my fever distance. He will stop at 5-7 K which are my maintenance distances. However his 5K are run really quicker than mine and also in Z2 and Z3 as I do. If we run together 5K he will take 8 or 10 minutes less than I do to complete that course.

All this means to my understanding, that his performance score and Vo2 are higher than mine while he lacks of endurance comparing to mine.

In a nutshell my endurance score should be higher than his whilst my performance score is lower.

I am not considering the age difference, which will deliver an even higher endurance score for me proportionally speaking. This also happens with the Vo2 if we look at the Vo2 age based tables for men.

Does it make sense? Or I am missing something 

I am not a high skilled runner of course i am not. But being 60 years old and weighting 90 Kg, i cannot have a better Vo2 than the one i reached (44,5 currently) Even if that is not an exact labo compared number, it went up from 36 to 44 in 10 years time. My timing and so speed went up too, my average HR went down and I currently run more than 1000 km per year. That in 10 years time against the natural watch because my age obviously went from 50 to 60. Believe me if i tell you that this is quite noticeable.

So I am taking about improvement and relative numbers. Not at all about absolute ones. 

I am so used to listen to my body that I don't actually need a Fenix sophisticated gadget. But I paid a big amount of money and that is why I expect the watch to work as it should.

Regards

Hi Miguel, are you involved in beta testing program? Maybe that is only applicable to Garmin Connect app (where I signed for that) and not software updates of the watches (but would made sense that it all goes hand in hand) but I noticed that drops some time ago when I created this thread. So maybe it was beta functionalitty, now implemented also among regular users. This thread was almost dead until last few days.

Hi. Not I am not. I only installed what Garmin officially releases via OTA. As of the Connect app, Google Playstore autoupdates. 

But I didn't notice a Connect App update lately..

However, on Wednesday the 11th I updated my watch to 18:14 and since then, I have had these Enduramce Score systematic droppings. 

Something to add. The insight of my Endurance Score reads that it has been stable for the last four weeks. It does not account for the drop that has happened within the last 8 days. More or less 80 points down and counting.