Garmin Connect is a detailed app with a ton of features under the hood. Users of the best Garmin watches can break down all sorts of stats in all sorts of ways using the app, from seeing the last year’s worth of stress scores on a graph to analyze trends, to planning routes and courses to export to your Garmin watch.
It doesn’t just work in the background to enable your watch, collecting and displaying data:: it’s a powerful health and fitness tool in its own right. Garmin recently debuted Lifestyle Logging, a feature which requires users to add tags like “morning caffeine” or “heavy meal” or “cold shower/bath” in order to provide additional context to your metrics. That got me digging back into Garmin Connect in order to see what other ‘active’ features I’m missing out on, rather than the ‘passive’ data collection aspect.
While rooting around in the app like a pig after truffles, I hit a tab I genuinely haven’t even looked at in the last 18 months: the Gear tab, and its ability to track the mileage of your running shoes, bikes, and other kinds of equipment.
It’s not a feature I see talked about often in Garmin’s marketing materials, or even among fellow users online. A few years ago, I asked one of Garmin’s experts how to get the most out of the app, and the Gear tab didn’t even come up.
The Gear tab shows subcategories for running shoes, bikes and other items. It allows you to input a brand and model, a maximum distance before you get a notification about the gear needing to be retired, and the categories of exercise the gear will be automatically added to.
This is important. The foam in running shoes wears down after around 300-500 miles, and that doesn’t mean a loss of speed and comfort: old, worn-out running shoes affect your gait, putting you at risk of Achilles tendonitis after miles and miles of microtraumas.
I’ve been running with my old Altras for a while now, and I haven’t been tracking the total mileage. To be honest, I wouldn’t even be able to give you a proper estimation. While I haven’t experienced any discomfort, it’s a little like a frog-in-boiling-water situation: if I notice, it’s probably too late.
However, as luck would have it, I’m just in the process of switching running shoes: I’m about to put some serious miles into the Saucony Ride 19s. What a perfect opportunity to track my shoes from the very start of their lives!
I also own several pairs of trail shoes, so I’ll need to make separate profiles for those and remember to switch them over each time I go for a trail run. That’s a tad more annoying, and will require input. This is the kind of thing I frequently forget to do, like starting a set in the gym without pressing the button on my Garmin watch, so it still thinks I’m resting.
Nevertheless, away from the injury issue, I think it’s a cool addition to the running hobby to be able to see the lifespan of your gear over time. It’s a nice way to retire a pair of much-loved shoes with a bit of ceremony after a tough year of marathon training, while also avoiding any niggles that might come with old and used-up gear.
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