What It’s Like to Train for a Race With Garmin’s Training Plans

I recently reviewed the Forerunner 265, Garmin’s $499 running watch. In the process, I started poking at the parts of the watch and app that promised to give me a training plan, and eventually asked it to get me ready for a 5K race. (That’s five kilometers, or 3.1 miles.) I enjoyed the training and ended up clocking my best 5K time in years. Let me tell you about how it went, and how you can potentially have a similar experience.

What I wanted to get out of the training plan

Ultimately, I just wanted to put the watch through its paces for the review, so that was my main goal. I didn’t approach this by asking “how can I get the best possible time in a race?”—although my thoughts did start wandering in that direction once I’d been training for a while. 

Garmin’s app and some of their watches (depending on model) can give you training plans for a variety of distances, including marathon (26.2 miles), half-marathon (13.1 miles), 10K (6.2 miles), and 5K (3.1 mile) distances. 

That shortest distance, the 5K, is a common gateway to racing for beginners. In most places, and during most seasons, you can find a 5K to race on almost any weekend. They’re beginner-friendly, so you don’t have to worry about whether you’re “fast enough,” but even experienced runners can get hooked on the prospect of improving their 5K time. I’ve run plenty of 5Ks, but none recently. I did always enjoy them more than longer races. 

Once I’d been training with the watch for a little while, I decided I did want to run a fast 5K, after all. What better way to test the watch’s training plans than to try one myself? And what better way to test their adaptability than to constantly decline suggested workouts because, come on, life is busy and running is not my top priority? I made it through, and had a great time on race day.

How training plans work on Garmin watches

When you wear a Garmin watch, you’ll install an app on your phone called Garmin Connect. This allows you to view your runs and your health data from your phone, create workouts, mess with settings, and so on. 

In the app, you can set up workouts in several ways. 

• You can create workouts and add them to your calendar. The workout you added will pop up when you begin a run from your watch on that day. 

• You can download or sync a training plan from another app or source. For example, the Runna app can add workouts to your Garmin calendar.

• You can use the Garmin coach feature to choose one of the Garmin Coach “expert” plans with Coach Greg, Coach Amy, or Coach Jeff.

• On some watches, including the Forerunner 265 and up, you can use the Garmin Coach feature to choose an adaptive training plan. 

These last two are what people usually mean when they talk about Garmin training plans. I mainly used the adaptive training plan, but I’ve played around with both and can tell you about the differences in their features. 

There’s one more way to get workouts from your Garmin watch, sort of. Some watches, including the Forerunner line, have some version of “daily suggested workouts” (often abbreviated DSW). The Forerunner 55 and 165 will only give you a workout for the current day, while the 265, 965, and Fenix watches will allow you to view a full week’s worth of DSW (and even let you do a future workout early). 

The adaptive training plan is only available if you have a watch with weekly DSW. This includes the company’s medium- and higher-end running watches, including the Forerunner 255, 265, and 965, and the Fenix line (versions 6 and up). Garmin has a full list of compatible watches here. The adaptive training plan is basically an app-friendly version of the daily suggested workouts. If your watch doesn’t support a full week’s worth of DSW—say, you have a Vivoactive 5—you can still use Garmin Coach, but you’ll be limited to the expert plans.

How Garmin’s expert plans compare to their adaptive plans

If you’re trying to decide between the two types of plans, and you have a watch that supports both, here are the main differences: 

Timing

The expert plans require a certain number of weeks between the start and your race day. For example, setting up a plan today (in early November), I wasn’t able to give it a race date in March. Each plan has a minimum and maximum number of training weeks, which will differ from plan to plan. 

The adaptive plan, on the other hand, will work no matter when your race is. If it’s far in the future, you’ll just get non-specific workouts until race day is closer. 

A friendly face

The expert programs each have a named coach—a real-life person with a face and a name. This coach doesn’t personally interact with you, but they have filmed videos describing their training philosophy and giving advice, and each expert plan has a different vibe to it. Coach Jeff will use run/walk intervals, for example (he’s kind of famous for it). 

The adaptive plans have none of that. There’s no named coach, no videos with tips or encouragement. Just workouts. 

The confidence gauge

The expert plans have this cute little gauge in the corner, showing how “confident” your coach is that you’ll be able to achieve your goal. If I ask for a certain 5K time, for example, I’ll want to see that gauge in the green. That tells me I’m on track. If I slide into the orange zone, I know I’m slacking. There’s also a red zone that means I’m really not on track, and on the other end there’s a purple zone that would mean I’m doing so well I can probably aim for a loftier goal.

In the adaptive plans, there’s no confidence gauge. (This is the main thing I miss when using the adaptive plans.) That said, watches that support the adaptive plans also tend to have a race predictor feature. You can access this through the app or through a “glance” on the watch. So you can check at any moment to see your predicted time. This doesn’t account for future training, though—so if I’m targeting a 24-minute 5K, but I’m currently in 26-minute shape, I’ll see 26 minutes when I look at my race predictor. 

What the first few workouts look like

There’s one more big difference. Every time I’ve chosen an expert program, it’s started me off with a “benchmark run,” and no future workouts are scheduled until I’ve done that benchmark. That’s what I see right now on a Coach Greg 5K plan. Previously, when I set up a 10K training plan with Coach Amy, I got that benchmark run and a one-mile time trial in the first week. 

The adaptive training plans, on the other hand, simply suggest workouts that will make sense for you given your current training status and goals. There are no benchmarks or time trials built in. Just to check, I started an adaptive training plan today, and the first thing on my schedule was a one-hour-long “base” (easyish) run.

Overlap with daily suggested workouts

Here’s a fun fact: if you’re doing an expert plan, you can also have access to the daily suggested workouts on your watch. They’ll just be hidden. On the 265, press the middle left button and select Training to view your suggested workouts. 

With the adaptive plan, your plan and the daily suggested workouts are one and the same. Basically, the adaptive plan is a way to view your daily suggested workouts on your phone, which wasn’t a feature the app had until recently. 

Rescheduling

On the expert plans, if you don’t like your schedule for the week, you can tap the three dots menu to reschedule a run on your calendar. This is handy if, for example, you have hill repeats scheduled for tonight but you can’t get out to the park with your favorite hill until tomorrow. 

On the adaptive plans, you can’t reschedule workouts for the future. You can do a future workout today, though. And if you skip today’s workout, there’s a good chance it will show up again in the future.

Other races on your calendar

The daily suggested workouts (and thus the adaptive plans) take account of any and all races you might put on your calendar. You can only designate one as your primary race for the training season, but the others can be “supporting” events, and your suggested workouts or your adaptive plan will take them into account. 

As far as I can tell, this doesn’t happen with the expert plans. They’re geared for the specific race you set them up for. 

Race distances

The expert plans are available for 5K, 10K, half-marathon, and marathon races. The adaptive plans can be geared toward a race or personal goal of any distance. 

Training with heart rate

In the expert coached plans, the workouts are typically assigned with pace targets. (For example, you might be assigned to do an easy run at 10:30 minutes per mile.) You can’t change this in your settings, but you can edit individual workouts if you’d like.

In the adaptive plans, workout targets may be set to either pace or heart rate, and you can switch the target as needed. For example, if I’m about to run on a hilly road, I’ll use a heart rate target, because I know I’ll slow down on those hills. After making that switch, nearly all of the runs in the plan will be given with heart rate targets instead of pace targets—until or unless I decide to change it back.

How to use the workouts from the training plan 

Everything else I’m describing here works the same way regardless of which coaching option you use. For more on what it’s like to follow different types of Garmin workouts, you can see what I wrote in my Forerunner 265 review. 

Every training day, you just hit the Run button as usual (or Treadmill Run, Trail Run, or Track Run). The assigned workout for that day will pop up.  After completing a workout, you’ll get an execution score telling you how closely you stuck to the plan for that day. (Anything above 66% is considered good.) 

There’s no penalty for a poor execution score, or even for skipping a run. You just might find a similar workout scheduled for the future if the app thinks you need more of that kind of run in your training.  

What I did for my race

I didn’t choose a race right away when I started using a Garmin watch. I was just trying to build up mileage and be more consistent with my running habit. At first I picked a 10K plan with Coach Amy, but honestly…it wasn’t for me. At least not for my current stage of training. There were threshold workouts that asked me to hold a too-fast pace for too long, and I hated them. (In hindsight, they were probably fine, but it was hot out and I was not used to doing that kind of work.) 

I ended up quitting the plan, and just using the daily suggested workouts for a while. I didn’t follow them religiously; if a workout looked fun or interesting, I did it. If it looked miserable, I didn’t. You would think this kind of lackadaisical attitude would lead to poor results, but I also had a mileage target in mind every week, supplied by my own brain and not the Garmin app. As long as I got in 20 miles that week (or 25, or 30—I gradually ramped up), I knew I was doing OK. 

That approach paid off. I saw my predicted 5K time creeping from the low 30 minutes down to 29, 28, and it kept dropping. “You know…” I said to myself. “There’s a half-marathon in a cool place in October. I don’t want to do a half this year, but they have a four-mile option. Maybe I’ll sign up for the four-miler.” I put it on my calendar, the workouts adapted, and soon I was looking at predictions for that race as well. I started to have dreams of winning an age-group medal. 

Well, now that I had an actual goal race, I figured I’d try the coaching plan again. This time I used the adaptive plan and asked it to train me for a 5K (I didn’t realize that I could have asked specifically for the four-miler) and added a fake 5K race to my calendar that was the same day as the four-miler. And from that point forward—maybe two months out, if I’m remembering correctly?—I did my best to run as many of the plan’s workouts as I could. 

I still skipped a few of the gnarlier threshold runs. 18 minutes at 5K pace? No thanks. But that cute little sprint workout with the 15-second bursts and long recoveries? That’s fun, I’ll do that one any time it pops up. 

Even with this imperfect training, my predicted 5K time kept dropping. And then the week of the race, disaster struck: a family event that I could not skip was rescheduled for my race day. Instead of planning a drive to the mountains to race on an abandoned highway, I used the “find an event” feature on the Garmin calendar to find a 5K that was the same weekend, but Saturday instead of Sunday. I lucked out: there were two options. I chose the one that was listed as “fast and flat,” since the other was described as “challenging” (that means hilly). 

The night before my race, my watch predicted a 25:50 finish time. I ran the race, and finished in 26:04. Tragically, the GPS measurement from the watch came in at 3.09, so it never officially credited me with a new 5K PR. (It’s not an all-time PR for me, but it would have been a PR as far as Garmin knows. My best ever 5K time was 25:20, and that was thirteen years ago, so this is pretty darn great in my book.) 

My advice for running with the Garmin coached plans (any of them)

Here’s where I describe a few things that I don’t like, and I’ll give my advice for working around those shortcomings. Preferences vary, so you may find that what bothers me may not bother you. Still, this is my personal advice.

First, it bugs me that you can’t look ahead and see what awaits you during the entire training plan. That’s true no matter which type of plan you choose. There’s no way to know in Week 1 what awaits you in Week 8. Now, I’m happy to play fast and loose with 5K training, since 5Ks are low-key, low-pressure races. They’re quick to recover from, and they cost, what, 25 bucks to enter? If you have a bad 5K, you learn from it and you can go run another one next weekend. 

If I had a big goal race planned, though, like a marathon, I wouldn’t dream of trusting the whole thing to an app that could change things around on me. Every now and then you see somebody on Reddit asking what they should do since their marathon is only a month or two away and they still haven’t had any runs longer than an hour or so. That’s a horror story, even if it turns out that person may have set up the plan wrong or skipped so many runs it couldn’t figure out what to assign. You shouldn’t find that out the hard way.

So my advice is to give yourself a big-picture target or two for guidance. A weekly mileage target is a good one, since mileage is one of the biggest drivers of progress in running. No matter what my app suggested, I made sure I was always within range of my target mileage for the week. (For me, that was 20 to 30 miles.) It’s not a bad thing to trust a program when it gives you an occasional week that’s harder or easier than you expected, but having a rough target helps to make sure you’re not under- or overdoing it for weeks on end. 

If you’re training for a longer race, like a marathon or half-marathon, you’ll probably also want to have a rough sense of the length your long runs should be, and the weekly mileage you should be logging, especially in the peak weeks. Peek at an established program (one of the free ones from Hal Higdon, for example) to make sure you’re more or less on track. For example, between one and two months out from race day, you should have several runs in the 16 to 20 mile range.

The other thing to remember is that you know your body better than any app. If you need an extra rest day or an easy run instead of a workout, take it. The plan will adapt. And if you need a type of workout that’s not scheduled—hill repeats, for example, when you have a hilly race coming up—just swap it in. You’re not hurting anybody’s feelings, and any good plan can survive a healthy dose of life getting in the way.