Rest Timer feature

sky-runner

Has Suunto considered adding a Rest Timer feature which is present in Garmin’s Ultra Run activity type.

For those who don’t know what this is, this is a feature most useful for racing ultramarathons where you can spend a lot of time at a checkpoint or an aid station, or taking a rest for another reason. When rest timer is activated it shows on top of data screen very similarly to how Suunto watches show paused time. But it isn’t a real pause - the elapsed time continues and the watch continues to record GPS and everything else. That means that even if user forgot to deactivate the rest timer when leaving an aid station, no real data is lost. The main purpose is to make user aware of how long they were resting. In Garmin, rest timer is activated by pressing the lap button and deactivated by pressing the lap button again, and in the FIT file it inserts two lap events. That allows to analyze rest stops later.

Tieutieu

interesting feature.
SA already gives « stationary time » after activity.
But how distinguish rest pauses from other manual laps ?
For ultra trails I have a personal sport mode with no automatic laps. I set check points to strategic points (aids station mainly) to have remaining distance to next point, and I add manual laps…but don’t always stop at those points.
This feature would need another way than manual laps to be activated/disactivated imho.

The_77

Doesn’t the Ultra Walking Suunto+ App have exactly this functionality? I was testing it a bit at the start of last year, and it could show the length of your pauses whilst they were occurring, and then showing overall time of pause in activity too.

This is the end summary.

MKPotts

This feature request has come up a few times in the forum. I run quite a few ultramarathons each year, have a Garmin watch (Enduro) with the rest timer feature and I agree that it is very useful in long races.
This is because it shows you how long you’ve been at the current aid station / checkpoint - which can help a lot when you’re trying to avoid a planned short stop becoming a much longer one (easily happens when very tired) or to make sure you don’t run out of time if the checkpoint has a maximum stay of e.g. 30mins.

As far as I know the SuuntoPlus app only shows your total stop time - so the value shown at a checkpoint will include the time stopped at previous checkpoints, time stopped on route for any reason etc.
You could work around this on Suunto watches by creating a custom data page with lap time and total time. But this will take one of the (precious few) allowed data screens and, for post-race analysis, needs you to find the lap amongst all the others. Whereas with the Garmin rest timer, Connect shows them separately as “rests”.

I believe on newer Garmin watches (e.g. Enduro 2) the rest timer starts and stops automatically but I’ve not tried this, so don’t know how well it works.

gerstlauer

@sky-runner Yeah this would be a really useful feature, thanks for bringing it up.

The_77

@MKPotts it has be a while but I thought it counted up from zero and then added to the overall time, I’d have to go try it again - or ask @isazi since it’s their app.

sky-runner

@MKPotts said in Rest Timer feature:

I believe on newer Garmin watches (e.g. Enduro 2) the rest timer starts and stops automatically but I’ve not tried this, so don’t know how well it works.

Yes, there is auto-rest timer as well on Enduro 2 and Fenix 7 series but it doesn’t work reliably on mountain terrain so I never used it just like I never used auto-pause.

sky-runner

@The_77 Looking at the description of the Ultra Walking app it doesn’t seem the same. The goal of the rest timer is be aware of how much time you are spending at each stop (not cumulative) to avoid lingering too much.

There are two problems with doing that as an an S+ app:

You have to scroll data screens to the app
It takes one of the two S+ slots

In contrast, the rest timer just pops up on top of whatever data screen the watch is currently at with minimally obstructing the data. The UI is somewhat similar to when a Suunto watch is paused. Surprisingly I can’t find a single photo of this feature on the Internet.

The_77

@sky-runner oh I agree it would be useful, just I don’t know if it’s less likely to be implemented because such an app already exists, if that make sense?

MKPotts

@sky-runner
There’s a photo in DCR’s review of the original Enduro, hopefully this link works:
https://media.dcrainmaker.com/images/2021/02/clip_image0018.jpg

Also shown on the Garmin product page for the Enduro, possibly also on the newer models pages too:
https://www.garmin.com/en-GB/p/702797

I’d copy the photos here but can’t work out how to insert an image into a post.