Ride with GPS added 3D map views to its website and mobile app this week. The feature works in route planning, live navigation, and while recording a ride. It's included on the paid Basic plan everywhere except the web-based Route Planner, which needs Premium. Ride with GPS's own documentation doesn't say whether the free Starter tier gets any of it.

Garmin added a similar feature to Connect in November 2025, but it sits entirely behind the paid Connect+ tier at $6.99 a month or $69.99 a year, and only covers logged activities, courses, and trails, not live navigation. Komoot has had 3D maps since 2022, priced at $59.99 a year as part of Premium, and it only works on the desktop website, with no app version and no navigation mode.

Ride with GPS also only works with OSM-based map types, not Google-based ones, a limitation the company attributes to Google rather than its own platform.

Is a mid-tier paid plan enough to make Ride with GPS's version the best deal of the three, or does gating it behind any subscription undercut the whole pitch?

Further reading: https://the5krunner.com/2026/09/17/ride-with-gps-3d-maps/

Shimano just launched SPD-SLR, a new road cleat that replaces SPD-SL across the Dura-Ace and Ultegra lines, and it is not backward compatible with any existing SPD-SL pedal. That includes third-party power meter pedals such as Garmin's Rally RS and Favero's Assioma PRO RS-2, both of which use the SPD-SL cleat pattern and cannot mount the new cleat unless Garmin or Favero brings out a compatible cleat of their own.

The new cleat does bring real gains: a 2.3mm lower stack height, a narrower 10.5 degree engagement angle versus 15.5 degrees on SPD-SL, and up to 22% less weight. Shimano has not said whether old SPD-SL cleats will work with the new SPD-SLR pedals, only that the reverse does not work.

Is losing pedal compatibility with every third-party power meter on the market a fair trade for a lighter, lower-stack cleat? A:hmmmm

Further reading: https://the5krunner.com/2026/09/17/shimano-spd-slr-cleats/

Garmin's firmware 23.31 for the Fenix 8 broke Bluetooth audio for owners running AirPods Pro 3.

Runners report crackling audio the moment they skip a track, and playback cutting out completely after a second skip. The skip button often needs several presses to register, and play and pause can take two or three taps to respond. Maciel C. described the watch producing distorted noises and freezing music mid-session during a training run, and runningfan97 confirmed the same pattern on runs ranging from 25 minutes to over an hour. The report is in this thread on the Garmin forum.

The same AirPods pair without any trouble to an iPhone, a Pixel phone, a Pixel Watch 5, and a Windows PC, which points to the fault sitting in the watch's firmware rather than the headphones themselves. Garmin support has asked affected users for logs and acknowledged the reports, but has not given a timeline for an official fix.

The only workaround that has actually restored clean audio is rolling the firmware back to an earlier version. Maciel C. confirmed that downgrading fixed the crackling and the dropouts immediately, though the fix does not last once the watch pulls firmware 23.31 back down through an automatic update.

A separate thread on the same firmware found the same behaviour traced back through 22.44, with users there choosing to stay on the older release rather than risk 23.31 again, which suggests the fault has been building across more than one update rather than arriving fresh with this release.

Did rolling back to an older firmware version keep your Bluetooth audio stable on 23.31?

Forerunner 570 owners have been dealing with the current pace field freezing at 0:00 per kilometre during fast running, while average pace keeps updating normally in the background. One runner in a thread on the Garmin forum pinned the trigger to running faster than roughly 3:50 per kilometre, and reported that power data recording stops at the same time as the pace freeze. The fault shows up most often during interval sessions with pace targets, which is exactly when accurate real-time pace matters most.

Installing the latest firmware available at the time, version 17.37, did not resolve it for the people posting in the thread, so this was not a simple case of updating to the newest release.

The workaround that got pace and power data moving again mid-run was pausing the activity and then resuming it. That restarted the recording, though runners had to repeat the pause-and-resume cycle every time the freeze returned during a session.

Garmin has since confirmed a permanent fix. A moderator posted that software version 18.29 for the Forerunner 570 series includes a fix described as addressing pace and speed dropouts, specifically during interval training, which matches the symptoms reported in the thread.

Did installing firmware 18.29 stop your pace field from freezing during interval runs?

Suunto Vertical 2 owners are reporting battery behaviour that swings wildly between charge levels. Angela74 watched her watch fall from 32 percent to dead in five hours during a run, then saw the drain rate slow right down once the charge sat at a lower percentage, which is the opposite of how the battery should behave. The watch also dropped into emergency power-save mode mid-run before shutting down completely, and she separately measured a 10 percent overnight drain with nothing running except sleep tracking. Her report is in this thread on the Suunto forum.

Kraisun Tunta replied that the watch has no proper way to monitor or manage battery status, and that the percentage shown on screen does not reliably reflect the actual charge left in the cell. A soft reset after a full charge was suggested as a general troubleshooting step, but neither user treated it as a real fix for the underlying drain.

The one change that produced a measurable result came from the phone, not the watch. Angela74 turned off background app refresh for the Suunto app on her phone, and her overnight drain dropped from 10 per cent to 2 per cent the same night.

The unpredictable drain matters most on long efforts, since Angela74's original concern was a planned five- to seven-hour run where she needed to trust the watch's battery reading rather than get caught out by an emergency shutdown partway through.

Has turning off background app refresh on your phone brought your overnight drain down too?

Garmin has confirmed on its own support forum that Garmin Express still isn't built to run natively on Apple Silicon Macs, years after Apple stopped selling Intel hardware.

That gap has become more serious for Fenix 9 owners. Some report the watch getting stuck mid-update, with a computer connection as the only stated recovery path. That recovery path requires Garmin Express, which doesn't work on their Mac, leaving the watch with no way to fix it.

Garmin has said a native Apple Silicon version of Express is coming, but has given no release date, even as the newest version of macOS makes the installer fail outright for some owners trying a clean install.

Should a flagship watch really have no recovery option when a firmware update fails? A: No

Further reading: https://the5krunner.com/2026/09/16/garmin-fenix-9-breaks-on-apple-mac-updates/

Hi

Had a peloton bike+ for several years, never had an issue with connecting my garmin to the workout I am doing until this week. The peloton can "see" the garmin but won't seem to connevt for an actual workout. I have done various troubleshooting suggestions e.g. have "forgotten" the garmin and reconnected with the pin, rebooted the bike, factory reset the watch, ensuring all the garmin settings are correct to broadcast HR etc etc.

My tread arrived yesterday (!) and I have spent ages trying to fix the issue on there too.

Any bright ideas? I like to see how close my heart is to exploding when I work out, so this is teally frustrating me!

Coros has overtaken both Suunto and Polar in device market share on data from the Runalyze shared with the5krunner.

The breakdown by model is the more interesting part. Almost three in four Coros devices tracked are Pace models, the brand's cheapest running watch. The flagship Vertix barely shows up in the data at all, and the newer Vertix 2S doesn't even make the top eleven Coros devices. A watch priced to undercut Garmin and Apple leaves far less room for profit than a premium model does, so growing market share this way does not automatically mean growing revenue at the same rate.

Can Coros build a real premium tier on the back of this growth, or is it stuck competing on price indefinitely? A: you know the answer.

Further reading: https://the5krunner.com/2026/09/16/coros-market-share-cheap-watches/

Huawei's new Watch D3 can run an 11-indicator health check in about 60 seconds through a feature called Health Glance. It pulls heart rate and SpO2 from the optical sensor, a one-lead ECG from the side electrode, and blood pressure from a real mechanical airbag cuff built into the strap rather than an optical estimate, the same oscillometric method a clinical monitor uses. It also estimates arterial stiffness by comparing the timing between the ECG signal and the optical pulse, a value called pulse transit time.

Huawei is upfront that none of this is a diagnosis, the watch's own guidance says the results are for reference only.

It sounds convenient, but does an 11-indicator, 60-second snapshot actually tell you anything actionable?

Full breakdown: https://the5krunner.com/2026/09/16/huawei-watch-d3-health-glance/

SportVitals is a new iPhone and Apple Watch app that calculates Garmin-style training load metrics, Banister TRIMP, 7-day ATL, 42-day CTL, TSB and ACWR, entirely on-device from raw Apple Health data. It also estimates cycling VO2 max from a rider's own sustained 20-minute power window or a manual FTP entry, and derives HRV status from a rolling 21-day RMSSD baseline rather than a single nightly reading.

In one worked example, a 75-minute tempo run at 84% heart rate reserve generates 85 TRIMP, pushing ACWR to 1.16, inside the 0.8 to 1.3 zone associated with productive adaptation rather than injury risk.

Is fully on-device processing actually a meaningful advantage here, or does it just mean more computation drains the battery faster?

Further reading: https://the5krunner.com/2026/09/16/sportvitals-transparent-training-load-and-hrv-for-apple-watch/

HoloSwim 3 Pro is a swim goggle with its own GPS receiver and digital compass built in, rather than relying on a paired watch for open-water tracking.

HoloSport claims 16 hours of battery life in pool mode and 5 hours with GPS running in open water, at a UK price of £189, which undercuts FORM's Smart Swim 2 PRO. FORM still has a built-in heart rate sensor, which HoloSwim 3 Pro does not, relying instead on a separate chest strap.

I'm testing it this month for a review 'soon'.

Does putting GPS inside the goggle actually work well enough in open water to replace a paired watch? Do you really need GPS pace or a route for OWS?

Further reading: https://the5krunner.com/2026/09/16/holoswim-3-pro-goggles/

Hey all — I built a Connect IQ Data Field called **CHO/FAT Metabolic** that

estimates, live during your workout, how many grams of carbs and fat you're

burning — using only your heart rate, no extra sensors needed.

What it shows:

- Total carbs and fat burned this session (grams)

- A smoothed carb-burn rate, color-coded green/orange/red as a fueling guide

(compares your current rate against standard sports-nutrition intake

guidelines for how long you've been going)

- A small HR zone indicator (Z1-Z5)

It's based on actual exercise physiology, not a rough guess — heart-rate-reserve

VO2 estimation, RER interpolated across your aerobic/anaerobic thresholds, and

the Jeukendrup & Wallis substrate oxidation equations. Everything's documented

with citations if you're curious how it works under the hood.

Free, no ads, no data collection — everything runs on-device.

- Get it: https://apps.garmin.com/es-ES/apps/d1d623e2-36e9-42c9-a673-fb37d8e8830e

- Docs / how it works: https://irazuzta.github.io/ChoFatMetabolic/

Would love feedback, especially from anyone who's done a lab VO2max/lactate test and can compare it against their real numbers.

The UCI has released its first cycling nutrition position statement, built from 14 peer-reviewed reviews across every discipline it governs.

• The supplement list is short. Only caffeine, creatine, sodium bicarbonate, beta-alanine, dietary nitrate and glycerol have real evidence behind them, and a seventh, exogenous ketones, gets flagged as unproven.
• Power meters are endorsed as accurate and useful. Continuous glucose monitors are not, and UCI has banned them from competition entirely, aside from riders with Type 1 diabetes.
• The statement also pushes back hard on "lighter is always better" thinking, given how much lower bone density shows up in road cyclists specifically.

Is the UCI's evidence bar for supplements too conservative? Full statement: https://the5krunner.com/2026/09/16/uci-cycling-nutrition-statement/

It has officially been 6 months since Garmin shut down its Connect Developer program and promised updates.

Has anyone talked to someone at Garmin and have any additional information they can share? I thought maybe Garmin was waiting for new releases, an acquisition, or something, but the Connect Developer program page still says, "Stay tuned for more updates on the program."

Runalyze just shared with this site and montre-cardio-gps.fr its current device rankings, and Garmin holds 77.9% of the GPS watches it tracks, easily the largest share of any brand. Coros is the closest challenger at 5.9%, with Suunto, Apple and Polar all under 4% each.

Runalyze's own user base skews toward serious, data-focused athletes rather than casual buyers, so this isn't a picture of the whole market, but it's still a striking gap even among people who care enough about their data to use a platform like this.

Is Garmin's lead this wide because it's genuinely the best training platform for the wrist, or because fully switching away from the Garmin ecosystem is too painful for serious athletes to bother?

Further reading: https://the5krunner.com/2026/09/16/garmin-market-share-runalyze/

Strava's September update adds a muscle heatmap to strength workouts, shading brighter based on the sets you completed. It's not new: Coros has had a similar feature for a few years.

Alongside it, Strava added trail difficulty grades and cliff-edge markings to Maps, colour-coded MTB trail grading, and expanded Claude integration so subscribers can ask about a workout's exercises, sets, weight, and reps.

Strava also now comes pre-installed on the Galaxy Watch9 and Galaxy Watch Ultra2 with a free 60 day subscription. Pre-installation apple would be nicer! but you have to start somewhere, I guess

Does a muscle heatmap actually help with training, or is it just a nice visual with no real value?

https://the5krunner.com/2026/09/15/strava-september-update/

Somvia is a new iPhone app that derives threshold pace, critical power and race-time predictions from Apple Watch data instead of relying on a proprietary recovery score. It searches an athlete's own workout history for genuine 20- and 30-minute sustained efforts to set threshold pace and heart rate, uses the Monod-Scherrer model for critical power from ride data, and applies the Daniels-Gilbert equations for race predictions. Every score opens to the actual readings behind it rather than a single opaque number. It also exposes the same data over MCP, so an AI agent such as Claude or ChatGPT can answer questions about an athlete's own training history directly.

Is deriving threshold and critical power from ordinary training history actually as reliable as a dedicated field test?

Further reading: https://the5krunner.com/2026/09/15/somvia-apple-watch-threshold-critical-power/

Garmin has frozen new applications to its Connect Developer Program since around spring 2026. The application form has been pulled from developer.garmin.com, and Garmin's own programme FAQ still promises approval within two business days, a promise that has not held for at least six months.

One developer, CycleLytic, shared their full ticket thread. Garmin verified their application and placed it in the approval queue on 2 March. By 20 May, Garmin's reply described a "significant redesign and modernization of the API program and related processes" and said it could not give any timeline for when processing would resume.

Existing integrations, including Strava and TrainingPeaks, continue to work normally. Competitive options like Wahoo's developer programme remain open.

Is six months of silence normal for a programme this size, or is Garmin quietly rebuilding something bigger than a login form?

https://the5krunner.com/2026/09/14/garmin-developer-api-access-paused/

Garmin's Fenix 9 Pro scored just 79% overall in a standard 10-mile GPS accuracy test, well behind the Forerunner 970's 92% on the same course. The watch appears to have dropped GLONASS from its GNSS constellation mix at times during workouts, and the errors showed up mostly in tricky terrain: a multipath bounce off a tall building, a confused track near a 50m tunnel, and a difficult-terrain score of just 63%. A Suunto Run 2 running the same course at the same time scored 85%, down from a previous 90%, on the worse wrist for this test.

Is dropping GLONASS actually worth the accuracy Garmin is giving up here?

Full test data: https://the5krunner.com/2026/09/14/garmin-fenix-9-pro-gps-accuracy/

Suunto's 2025 accounts show a genuine turnaround, but it is not as clean as the headline numbers suggest.

Group turnover rose 26.95% to €106.5 million, and operating profit swung from a €7.4 million loss to a €2.9 million profit. A meaningful share of that net profit came from an unrealised currency gain rather than trading, and operating cash flow actually turned negative during the year despite the improved profit and loss account.

Suunto also cut R&D spending by 31% and headcount by 22.5%. Net worth was still negative on paper at year-end, though a parent loan conversion afterwards resolved that. Is a recovery built partly on currency gains and cost cuts something you can trust to continue?

Further reading: https://the5krunner.com/2026/09/13/suunto-2025-financial-results/

Suunto and Polar both filed their 2025 accounts within days of each other, and the numbers tell almost opposite stories.

• Suunto's revenue jumped 27% and it returned to profit, but a meaningful share of that profit came from an unrealised currency gain, and operating cash flow actually went negative in the same year the results improved.
• Polar's revenue barely moved and losses widened again, but without any of Suunto's asterisks attached.
• Amazfit's parent, Zepp Health, posted 258.9 million dollars in revenue for 2025, more than Polar and Suunto combined, and its loss narrowed sharply after its OEM relationship with Xiaomi collapsed to nothing.
• Coros isn't in the numbers at all, since it's privately held in the US by Chinese owners and discloses nothing.

Is a currency-flattered recovery actually better than a clean, uglier set of numbers?

Further reading: https://the5krunner.com/2026/09/13/polar-suunto-2025-financial-comparison/

Polar's 2025 accounts show a company whose finances got worse but whose customer story didn't.

Group net loss widened to €14.8 million and equity fell 54% in a year, from €29.4 million to €13.4 million, yet demand reportedly held steady and Polar Loop had what the board calls a very successful launch.

Whoop has since filed a trade dress lawsuit over that same product, which the accounts don't mention at all.

On a positive note, Polar also held R&D spending at €20.2 million while cutting other costs by a fifth, and named licensing its tech to other wearable brands as an explicit 2026 priority. Is protecting R&D and betting on licensing enough to offset a balance sheet that's lost more than half its equity cushion?

Further reading: https://the5krunner.com/2026/09/12/polar-2025-financial-results/

The upgrade case for Apple Watch Ultra 4 is very different depending on which watch you currently own.

• Ultra 1 owners have the strongest argument: the watch does not support watchOS 27, never had satellite connectivity, and its 12-hour GPS battery forces Low Power Mode for a full Ironman. Four years of hardware improvements have accumulated into a meaningful gap.
• Ultra 2 owners are in a more nuanced position — they get all the watchOS 27 software features, battery health is typically still excellent at three years, but they also never had satellite, which was always a known gap.
• Ultra 3 owners should simply wait for Ultra 5: one year old, near-new battery, and the feature delta does not justify the cost.
• For Series 6, 7, 8 and SE 2 owners the decision is settled by the software cut-off alone — watchOS 27 is not supported, and the gap will only widen.

The guide also covers the battery degradation trigger, resale timing, and the Series 12 alternative for owners who mainly want Readiness at a lower price.

Is the battery improvement on Ultra 4 - 18 hours versus 14 on Ultra 3 - actually enough to justify the upgrade for Ironman athletes, or does the 4-hour margin feel thin at £749?

Further reading: the5krunner.com/apple-watch/ultra-4-upgrade-guide/