MFH (My Favorite Husband) purchased a fancy new Garmin for me at the Chicago Marathon Expo last October. Up until then I had been running with a Garmin Forerunner 310XT. I didn’t have an complaints about the bells and whistles of the 310XT, my primary concern with it was the battery life.
I had moved into running Ultras that year (2014) and my first Ultra had taken 10:15. That’s a heckofa long time for a Garmin to be collecting data and for the battery not to poop out. I was interested in something with a longer/more reliable battery.
Enter my Garmin Fenix2.
Sweet, sweet watch!
When I brought the Garmin back to our hotel in Chicago (The Drake), I quickly read all about it and was pretty tickled to see that I could download the data directly to my phone and not have to hook everything up to my laptop. This was a selling point to me.
I have jumped through hoops ever since then trying to get my Garmin to talk to my phone. FINALLY, the light came on. The Bluetooth on my phone did not have enough fancy stuff for the Garmin to talk to it. Boo.
SO…..
Yesterday was the day I have been waiting for (impatiently, I might add), the day when I could upgrade my phone. I was pretty excited about this because my old phone was having some significant issues and it was almost DOA.
I spent Friday evening doing live chat with some poor soul at Verizon. Haha! Can you imagine spending your Friday evening working at Verizon being on live chat with some dumb old lady (me) answering probably the most inane questions? I hope I never meet whoever that was IRL.
After quite a bit of questions and answers, I knew what phone I wanted when I went into the store the next day.
So, after running 7 miles with MFH and then hitting an estate sale, we finally pulled in to the Verizon parking lot and got down to business. An hour later, I left with my new phone. I had decided on the Turbo Droid. It has a long battery life (a HUGE plus) AND it had a fancy enough Bluetooth that my Garmin would talk to it.
I was set.
I’ve been fiddling with that phone ever since. Installing apps…you know, all the stuff you have to do when you get a new phone. Finally, last night I went and got my Garmin and hooked up the Bluetooth so they would talk to each other.
Success!!!
Or so I thought.
I got up this morning to grab a few miles before church and my Garmin informed me that the battery was almost dead.
WHAT!?!
This Garmin has a 50 hour battery life and I had just charged it yesterday!
Then I noticed something. I had emails, FB notifications…all sorts of stuff ON MY GARMIN!!!
Every morning, it takes me a good hour to get through all my emails and stuff and here all the stuff was on my Garmin!
THAT was when I realized that my fancy Garmin had WiFi!!! That’s actually pretty cool but not so great when it sucks my battery dry overnight.
I plugged in the Garmin for a few minutes, just enough to let me get 4 miles logged and headed on home to get ready for church.
I’ve done some fiddling with the Garmin and my phone this afternoon and I’m keeping an eye on things to see if all of my WiFi stuff shows up on my Garmin again. I’m also watching that battery life. I need to do more than 4 milers this week!!! HA!
So, that’s my tale. Pretty cool phone and pretty cool Garmin!