Techy Tuesday: Setting Up Garmin Workouts Online

Thanks to Nikki at Slow is the New Fast, I made a fabulous new discovery last week.  You can create workouts for your Garmin online!!!   Blows my mind!  I don't know how I didn't discover this before. 

I have been hesitant to actually get started setting up a workout on the device itself mainly because navigating around a teeny watch face seemed so hard (my last Garmin had to be set up on the device).  So, for fun, I decided to take this feature for a spin. 

First things first - navigate to the Workouts Tab when you are logged into your Garmin Connect account.  I clicked the "Create a new Workout" button and off I went.

The interface was super simple to use - just fill in a title and select the elements you want in your run.  I kept it simple for my first test - just setting up my long slow distance runs for the next couple of weekends. 

 Here are the drop-downs for each options so you can see exactly how customizable it really is:

I could have set it up much more complicated than that - for example to program in each walk break - but I chose to keep it simple. The online interface is super simple to use, though it might require my calling on my not-so-considerable math skills to program a more complicated run.

When I was done - I added it to the calendar for those dates and then clicked the "Send to device" button so my Garmin would receive the information.

Now, for the real test.   Since I was testing it with slower paces than I usually run an LSD (the Running Room training schedule paces), I chose the test to be on 10K that I was doing solo.  JS was away this past weekend so I hit the paths at Glenmore and puttered on my way.

Only to find that my workout hadn't made it onto my watch. 

I'm not sure what happened nor am I sure I would know how to check beforehand.  I just assumed that it would automatically pick u p since I had set a date on it.   Perhaps it is saved on there as a date for me to select on the watch.  This might all be an operator error, but my version of common sense told me that if I set a date and the Garmin recognized that it was that date - then the workout should have automatically played.

I'm disappointed, but I'm not going to give up...but for this first test - it was a FAIL.   Maybe someone can share in the comments where I might have gone wrong :)