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How to keep laps inside a Garmin Coach "Step"

laertis
1 month ago

I wasn't sure how to phrase this properly so it can better searched or indexed, but here is an example that will probably clear things out

  • I'm using coach Jeff for a 5K plan.
  • There is one type of workout in the plan called "Run Walk Run"
  • During this workout you 're called to do a warm up step, followed by the main run-walk-run step for a specific distance, let's say 8k, followed by a cooldown/recovery

What I usually do, is split the main run-work-run step to 800 meters running at target pace followed by 200 meters walking. So that would be (800m run / 200m walk) x 8

What I want to do is keep laps of these splits inside the run walk run step !!
This will tell me how I did in a lap without me having to make complex mathematical operations while my glucose and glycogen are being depleted!

I'm afraid that if I hit the lap button I will jump to the next step
(I remember though one occasion where I accidentally hit the lap button inside a Garmin Coach step and it didn't jump to the next step)

Also, setting auto lap to 800m will not work again because even though it will work for the 1st lap after the warm up, the next auto lap will start when I finish the 1st 800m run and entering the 200m walk. So the 2nd auto lap would include the 200m walk and 600m out of 800m from my next run

Another drawback of the auto lap is that it's not flexible if you decide to adjust your splits based on how you're feeling. eg take shorter walks based on time instead of distance or cut your runs shorter if you're feeling tired

I hope this make sense and sorry for the long post Potato

  • 0 1 month ago

    In the absence of auto laps, in a structured workout, each workout step / interval (e.g. warmup, run, walk, cooldown) will behave as a separate lap, for most purposes. If auto lap is enabled, then any given workout step may be subdivided into laps (depending on how long the step is and how short the auto lap distance is), but not vice versa (no single lap can span more than a single workout step).

    So if you want to see how you’re doing during a workout step, you can use lap pace data field.

    It isn’t possible to take manual laps during a structured workout. As you’ve found, press the LAP button during a structured workout will simply advance the workout to the next step.

    If you want to cut any of the steps short, you can press the LAP button.

    If you want to manually subdivide a workout step into smaller laps during the workout, that isn’t possible. If you want to temporarily do so after the fact (for the purposes of looking at data), you could use https://www.runalyze.com - it’s a free site that syncs with Connect and shows you a lot of additional information about your activities. It also lets you temporarily chop up your activity into laps by arbitrary time or distance (the times and distances can be of different lengths, too).

  • 0 1 month ago in reply to FlowState

    If you really want multiple laps within each workout step in your example, your only choice would be to use an auto-lap distance that’s shorter than the step distance that you want to split up — e.g. use an auto lap distance of 100m or 200m. I doubt this will be a great user experience though.

  • 0 1 month ago

    I do the same plan and when the workout has a continuous "Run Walk Run" segment I basically just run continuously at a decent pace that I can sustain for the whole exercise (today I have a 11.7 km planned). This should improve endurance in the long run, which is the point of this exercise.

  • 0 1 month ago in reply to monk

    All these training programs are a bit open to interpretation but I don't think that the purpose of run-walk-run is to have continuous run. I mean they wouldn't call run-walk-run if that was the case. You can read more about it here: https://www.jeffgalloway.com/training/run-walk/

    In any case this is a different discussion than what I asked so let's not drift away

  • +1 1 month ago

    Thank you all for you answers! I 'll mark this reply as "Suggested Answer" since there doesn't seem to be away to manually add laps in a structured workout

    I'm also linking a past thread I found relevant to this topic: forums.garmin.com/.../how-to-add-laps-to-garmin-coach-workout