New Race 2 - heart rate awful, distances too short
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[link )Hi
I got a Race 2 this week. I have had a Race previously.
My understanding was that Suunto had finally resolved their heart rate issues with the Race 2. My watch is updated to the most recent firmware but heart rate accuracy is possibly the worst I ever ever seen. Over a 1 hour 40 minute run, at most only 3 or 4 minutes was within 25 bpm of an external sensir.
I did a 10 mile run, first 5 miles were climbing, then a 300 foot hill effort then the final 4 miles were downhill.
Throughout the ascent, the Race 2 heart rate ‘stuck very low’, hiverng around 100-110 bpm. Actual HR was my usual easy / high range (measured with an external HRM on another watch. After the hill effort the Suunto Race 2 heart rate finally began to climb but got stuck very high, around 190-195bpm (my max as a runner nearer 60 than 50 is 181).
Honestly heart rate monitoring via wrist seems totally broken -
This shows the elevation profile and actual HR from the watch
I have also uploaded a running power / elevation plot whicb shows very clearly Suunto heart rate is just not reflecting effort correctly.
I am strugging to get images to show up in thread, imgur isnt allowed in the UK, so have tried imgbb above
On another note, the Race 2 is clearly ‘shorting’ distance compared to prior runs with other watches including Suunto, Coros and Garmin and caliberated Stryd. Over just under 11 miles distance came up 0.20 miles short.
Both of these issues can be solved with external sensors but my feeling is that accuracy wise, Suunto have regressed.
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@cumbrian-runner It seems a little hard to say that" its awful" based on one singular run…
Did you wear your watch on the usual wrist ? Did you tighten it correctly ? Which strap did you use ? Do you even know if another watch would have given you a better result ? Yes, what you have shown happens, but no, considering that pretty much everyone agrees that the HR sensor is “pretty OK now” that looks a lot like a “you” problem.
And 0.2 miles less over 11 miles is 1.8% error relative to other untrusted sources (because no, other watch or a foot thing do not count as a reliable distance measurement), so I count that as “perfectly aligned”, did you check the gps track to see where the “undercounting” came from ?
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Have the Race 2 as well and have no issues with OHR - quite accurate actually and distance and elevation all correlate well with Vertical Ti as well as AWU.