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How is your 935 on trails?

My wife & I just got our 935's a few days ago and while they perform very well in open areas, we are pretty disappointed on the trails. My first run with the 935 was at a park with a mix of open fields and small patches of forest. As soon as I enter the forest, my pace drops significantly even though I am not slowing down. Yesterday I ran the same route with GLONASS enabled and saw no difference. I attached an image showing my splits where mile 3 is completely in the forest. Today my wife ran a wooded trail with the 935 on one arm and the 310XT on the other. The 935 was showing a 14-16 min/mile pace and was consistently one tenth of a mile behind the 310XT per mile ran. She had a half mile difference between the two after 5 miles.

I was hoping for better performance but it seems to be in line with every Garmin device I have owned (i.e. not great). I guess I will need to keep wearing my old 310XT for trail runs and pray that it doesn't die on me like my Fenix.

0 timgrose over 8 years ago

Be useful to post the GC links to the 935 and 310 ones to see how the GPS track is.

Are you saying that you can run at exactly the same pace in the forest as you can outside it?

When I last did a similar experiment with a 310 (last summer) it was noticeable how much less smoothing of pace and the GPS track there was with the 310 than more recent Forerunners.

0 timeasterday over 8 years ago

Be useful to post the GC links to the 935 and 310 ones to see how the GPS track is.

Are you saying that you can run at exactly the same pace in the forest as you can outside it?

When I last did a similar experiment with a 310 (last summer) it was noticeable how much less smoothing of pace and the GPS track there was with the 310 than more recent Forerunners.

Here are links to my wife's GC activities:
310XT:
https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/1742306711

935:
https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/1742239124

Not sure what you are asking about the pace. The place I was running at is pretty much flat everywhere so yes I can run the same pace.

0 rtperna over 8 years ago

Any GPS device is going to suck in areas with heavy tree cover. I run trail races a handful of times a year, and have to manually hit my lap button at the mile markers to get any kind of accurate splits.

That said, if I cared more, i'd get a Garmin foot pod to sharpen up the guesswork the watch has to do to figure out what's going on when it loses GPS. If you do this, just make sure to calibrate it for a handful of runs with no chance of the GPS dropping before taking it into the woods, so it learns your stride and can more accurately guess distance.

0 Olu.F. over 8 years ago

Trails are always hard to evaluate, especially if the maps are not accurate. The only way I definitively know how accurate a device is on a trail is on an out and back section. If the section from 1.85 miles to 2.2 miles is an out and back, the 935 is much more accurate.

http://www.mygpsfiles.com/app/#ieuD93XS

That's the two tracks together. The 935 looks much more true to the trail. Also the pacing on the 935 looks much better then the 310.

0 timgrose over 8 years ago

On the apparent reduction in pace under trees - this may well be Garmin's fault but equally just because an area is basically flat does not mean that your speed won't be effected by the underfoot conditions.

In my experience, areas under trees maybe softer (less sunlight to dry the trail) and bumpier so your effort may not change but your pace will. Of course this might not be a factor here but something always to consider.

And, as I hinted at, current pace from the 310 is all over the place. The 935 profile is much smoother. You say you ran even pace - the 310 seems to disagree.

0 chimpware over 8 years ago

I have done a good amount of trail and park runs with my 935 and find it to be reasonably accurate. I have experienced some sections where the Instant Pace is out quite a bit for a few seconds, but generally the 935 performs reasonably well on the trails, but it is still early in the season where I am and the trees are not fully leaved.

0 Former Member over 8 years ago

FR935 on trail

Yesterday i have made one race, and can tell , the batery is amazing, 18h27 in course and 24% remaining

0 Former Member over 8 years ago

Yesterday i have made one race, and can tell , the batery is amazing, 18h27 in course and 24% remaining

What settings did you have on your watch? Battery life reports without the details are hard to interpret :)

0 ekutter-dnu over 8 years ago

For mountain biking, my 935 is always significantly short compared to my Edge 810, often by 5% or more. Out on the road, they generally match up nearly identical, less than 0.1%. So I'm not sure which is more accurate on the trails. The GPS tracks generally are slightly better with the 935. I suspect the 935 does a bit more filtering for computing distance. Not sure I've ever paid attention to how the out and back accuracy is on each. I'll have to try that one of these days.

Good news is out on the trails, I don't really care about a slight difference in distance. Hard to compare one effort to another by distance anyways, because the difference in trail conditions, even on the same trail, likely will have a bigger impact on my speed, negating any differences in GPS computed distance.

Note both are set to every second recording, not that that should have any impact on reported distance.

0 Olu.F. over 8 years ago

I have a speed sensor on my front wheel for MTB to get accurate distances. I haven't tested the 935, but the F3 spanked my Edge 1000 on accuracy on trails.

The easiest places to check that is on areas where you can see the trail in satellite (obvious) and on sections that you cross over more then once.

These most be due to expire soon, but they're still up today

http://www.mygpsfiles.com/app/#oserfsEC
http://www.mygpsfiles.com/app/#6tsUiDsx