Race S - Mini review after 2 weeks

[guattang]

I got my first Suunto (a Race S) 2 weeks ago to replace a 7 year old Garmin Vivoactive 3 where the battery was failing and needed daily charging. I wanted a watch firstly for Running and secondly for daily wellness tracking.

What’s great:

• The GPS is perfect. I haven’t done any runs in any built up areas yet, but have done a number of runs under dense tree coverage, and so far all my GPS tracks have been spot on.
• The “FusedSpeed” feature is a revelation. I didn’t know about this feature before I bought the watch, and it is a big plus. It is great getting an accurate indication of my current pace on the watch while running.
• The watch itself looks and feels great. I think it looks stylish, and the build quality feels top notch.
• The watch UI is clean, intuitive and responsive. I enjoy using the watch.
• I love the mapping/navigation. I’ve already explored some new routes in a nearby forested area with a very confusing path/track network - in the past I would probably have just stuck to the limited routes I already know, but with the Race S route I didn’t take a single wrong turn! I’m planning on doing a Marathon next year, so really looking forward to exploring more as I keep increasing the length of my long runs.

What’s so-so:

• The OHR is OK. Not amazing, but acceptable. I did a simple 5 km run at a pretty steady pace, and recorded my heart rate via the Race S OHR, my old Vivoactive 3 OHR and a Wahoo TICKRX heart rate belt. The Race S was poor for the first 5 minutes or so, but then it pretty much mirrored the TICKRX after that. The Vivoactive 3 seemed to be consistently 1 or 2 bpm higher than the other two. I plan to do the same for some more challenging runs. For me, the Race S is accurate enough for longer runs, but I’ll probably wear the heart rate belt for things like intervals.

• Battery life is OK, but not great. It is about inline with the advertised specification and roughly matches my expectations before I bought it. I’d just like if had a little longer battery life (and yes I know the Race is the longer battery life option).

• The App is OK - it has some good points and is good for getting a quick overview of your stats, but has a number of limitations. In particular;

  • The graphs from your workouts are often unreadable, especially “pace” if you happened to stop/pause for a few seconds during the run (even with auto-pause enabled). The peak pace for those few seconds totally skews the graph scale and the meaningful data is compressed into a small range.
  • The app route planner is awkward to use. I had a route I previously created, and then wanted to copy this route and add an extra section about half way around - I couldn’t get this to work within the app and eventually gave up. Instead I created the route in plotaroute.com and uploaded the GPX for this into the app - this worked well and will probably be how I manage my routes from now on.
  • Creating structured workout via SuuntoPlus Guides is also cumbersome in the App. For example, it would be easier to be able to create an interval and simply select a HR Zone, but this isn’t an option - you need to manually enter the min/max HR values. I think it is possible to sync workouts from TrainingPeaks - I will signup to this and give it a try.

• No audio cues when following a structured workout/SuuntoPlus Guide. I knew this in advance, and it has been discussed here many times. Hopefully it is added at some point in a future upgrade.

• The key training metrics (CTL, ATL, TSB) are pretty misleading in the first few weeks without any historical data and the feedback from the Suunto Coach AI is also meaningless based off this. I’m not sure if I could have imported old workouts before starting with the Race S, but I didn’t. I guess I need to wait a few weeks to see how useful these metric are.

What’s not great:

• The blood oxygen measurement appears to be total garbage. I often see figures in the 80s% (and even seen it in the 70s%) - this would be a medical emergency if true. If it cannot get an accurate measurement it should just give “unmeasurable” rather than wildly inaccurate values. However, the blood oxygen values in my overnight report has so far been reasonable. I’ll just disable the blood oxygen widget and ignore this.
• The VO2Max calculation is far too high. It is estimating my VO2Max at 50, and a fitness age of 20 … this is great for my ego (I’m in my mid/late 50s ), but isn’t realistic. The forecasted Half Marathon based off this VO2Max is about 1 hour 36 minutes. Realistically I doubt I could currently break 2 hours for a HM.
• The App is smartphone only. I knew this before buying, but I miss not having a web based app (in addition to the smartphone app). Also I think using a mouse and keyboard rather than just a touch screen would allow much easier setup of things like routes and new interval workouts.

Overall I’m very happy with the Race S and have no regrets about my choice.

Note: Same review posted in Redit.

If anyone has any suggestions about improving the Blood Oxygen and VO2Max I’d be glad to hear.

[2b2bff]

@guattang said in Race S - Mini review after 2 weeks:

The VO2Max calculation is far too high. It is estimating my VO2Max at 50, and a fitness age of 20 … this is great for my ego (I’m in my mid/late 50s ), but isn’t realistic. The forecasted Half Marathon based off this VO2Max is about 1 hour 36 minutes. Realistically I doubt I could currently break 2 hours for a HM.

The VO2Max estimation about matched my Garmin, but the race prediction times are way too optimistic. The watch thinks I can run 10k in less than 41 minutes. The shortest time, yet has been 45 minutes, ususally 47 minutes and more…

[Miroslava]

@2b2bff I have the opposite problem, my vo2 max underestimates me. It shows me a minute worse time for 5km (I have 24.50) suunto shows 25.56 for 10km it underestimates me by at least 2-3 minutes. I also ran a threshold test from suuntoplus where I had a time of 24.50 for 5km, so I don’t understand either