I am 50 years old been running on and off for 5 years and have just run for health and never with a couch just made my runs as i went never training for anything .I bought a Garmin 265 to use the GDSW. I am also using the event training to do a half marathon. I set a half marathon training up for 16 weeks and it set up all the phases base,build,peak,taper and recovery phase giving you the date ranges of all the phases. During this training i decided to run a 10k race which i added to the event calendar but not as my primary event and it changed my training for that week to focus for the race on that Saturday. I have never ran a race before and the GDSW coached me to a 55:22 PB knocking 7 minutes off my best ran 10k time. During this training i have watched my predicted Half Marathon time decrease from 2:30 to 2:04 finish time and my VO2 Max raise from 42 to 44

A year!? Fair play mate, fantastic video and very insightful! Making me feel guilty about ignoring all those suggested workouts 🤣

One thing I liked was that one morning it changed from the previous night's sprints to a base run because I did not recover and sleep very well that night.

Nice one John. Thanks for posting a summary. Perhaps worthwhile explaining a little further about the Event Driven Suggested Workout. It isn’t a hack it is another function of Garmin. The setup is very straight forward, all you do is go into Garmin Connect, open calendar and then select the date of your race and then from the menu set create an event. The event selection is not limited to running but all activities. Follow the prompts and one of the final actions is to enter your distance. Once saved the event will appear in your calendar on on your (type dependent). So now when you go into the workouts it will show the event and then a suggested workout. So far I am a fan of the logic but think there is more Garmin could do to exploit the function. So far I have been impressed with the workouts it has suggested. Like you I am a masters runner (65-69) so am really focused on recovery following an intensive session. I am testing this Garmin facility for a 10k run and the training period between when I started and the race has been broken down into four phases, base, build, peak and taper. On the face of it, it seems to be doing things sensibly. Maybe, for your next experiment why not plug into Garmin Connect a Parkrun for sometime in the future and see how it goes. Thanks and all the best…

Thanks for a great video, I'm also considering following the GDSW every day now. By the way, great background music in the video!

Well done! Impressive parkrun times! Keep running healthy!

John just as an addendum. I wear my watch pretty much 24/7 only taking it off for a charge following my run. As such I have noticed that Garmin will change a workout following sleep. I went to bed expecting to do two twenty minute intervals only to find in the morning it had been updated to 5x8minute intervals. Both were targeting the same energy system and to be run at the same pace.

Great video John! I've been using the GDSW for about 6 weeks now and I'm really enjoying it!

I really like Garmin Suggestion Workout as well. Another feature I like with it is if you wear a Bluetooth headset while you work-out, you'll get verbal prompts before each step of the workout. Also great for PacePro workouts as during your race you'll hear how far you are behind/ahead goal pace and also tells you what your next mile goal pace is.

Thanks, I enjoyed that. I'm just starting using it now.

I also had Afib. Thanks for sharing

I also got injured on an earlier Sprint session. I went too hard, rather than really just feeling way through it. Caused me a bit of grief for a while with hip labral inflammation, but I was able to rebuild and strengthen to finish my first marathon last month. I'm still using the suggested workouts and preparing for another marathon in a couple months.

My GDSW has gone a bit crazy this week. It offered a threshold workout of 3x7 min with warm up and cool down on Tuesday. That wasn’t surprising as Tuesday’s seem to be the day it recommends threshold if the weekend goes well. Where it went crazy was on Wednesday. It suggested sprints when it almost always has recommended base or recovery after thresholds. I decided to just do a 10k base since I tweaked my right hamstring after the last sprint session. Woke up this morning to a second threshold session suggested with the exact same protocol as Tuesday. Very weird suggestions for a 48 year old runner…

That's a Real test! Thanks

I too ended up with a hamstring niggle after the sprint session. Luckily mine wasn’t severe enough to keep me out and I was suggested a recovery run and off day the two days following. I have a Fenix 6 Pro Solar and it doesn’t offer the weekly outlook, only the daily suggestion. That is a bit irritating because the watch has the technology for the software update but it seems a bit of a money grab by not adding the features. I would really like the upgrade but don’t want to shell out close to $1000 for the Fenix 7 Pro. I’d even be willing to pay a one time payment of $50 to maybe add a suite of features if they were made available.

Hi John, I am using GDSW as preparation to my next Half Marathon. One biggest complaint and not only to GDSW but to planned workouts is that Custom Alerts are not showing up, even those are defined in Run activity. Those are only pop up when I "run free", but not during GDSW. For short runs there is no need to remind to Drink or Eat, but for long runs 1h30 and longer it would be nice to have the same experience like during event. Do you have same observation about Alerts?

My GDSW Seem as if they are designed for someone else. My 4 WK load was at 253. After the GDSW my load was at 576. This isn't the first time either... This both feels and seems unsafe. Load ratio 1.8...

Nice summary!! One question though: how did you set up this plan in the first place? :) thank you

How do you get around the "problem" of parkrun every Saturday. ( plus I have another "problem" of a 1 hour social easy run with my running club on Sundays. )

You’re not using it properly since you’re supposed to track the sleep with it so it knows your longterm rest patterns and Hrv to suggest the workouts.

I have a 245 and my watch doesn't show upcoming workouts like yours. I just get today's. Do I have some feature disabled maybe?