I am planning on doing a triathlon. What is the best way to track the actual event on my Vivoactive 3? Do I need to treat it as 3 separate workouts to get the proper metrics for each phase?
Oh, and one more thing. Many cheap ANT+ chest straps are waterproofed enough to survive the swim leg, although HR data won't be provided for the swim leg. So not sure if paying extra for the expensive HRM-Swim or HRM-Tri is justified.
Do you have a reccomandation (Amazon link?) for a cheap ant+ hrm strap which survives the Swimming part?
The cheap strap is an Option, but before buying a HRM tri I would like to buy a HRM swim because: It is possible that I buy a device which is able to hr-tracking while Swimming in the next years. And with the hrm-tri I cannot use it at pool Swimming. Is hrm swim really that unconfortable under triathlon clothes, or is the difference not that great?
The HRM-Swim is much less stretchy. It will be uncomfortable when your chest compresses and decompresses under heavy breathing. Whether it's bearable is of course relative.
I think HerrRiebmann is wrong on this, or he misunderstood the question.
Yes, I´ve overread that he doesn´t want to record the heartrate during the swim.
Thank´s for clarification :)
PS: As I know, all Garmin HRM-Straps will work with any ANT+ device. But the features wont. Like balance, vertical movement, contact time, ect. from HRM Run or the offline data storage on SWIM or TRI. I still use the strap from my VA1 and it is waterproof (against it´s technical specification). At least for swimming and for about 30 minutes.
Sounds like this is your first tri. If so, I would offer a little different advice from the above 2 "masters." My advice: stick with the VA3 for now and not spend big $ for watch feature that you may only use 1 day of the year.
Thank you for this Godolphins, super helpful! I (like it sounds the OP) am also new to triathloning - doing a taster event in a few weeks - and don't want to splash out having already bought the VA3 for running, cycling and day-to-day activity tracking. That app you mentioned looks like the answer to my prayers.
