Deth

Last summer, Molly bought me, well, each of us a Garmin HRM Pro strap. My old Wahoo which worked for me for longer than I expected with a brand I didn’t recognize had held up well. It actually still works, but the strap is coming apart, so it’s just a matter of time until it tears completely. I had used it for nearly three years, so wear and tear is to be expected.

The Garmin one seemed to be quicker to pick up my heart rate and was a little more comfortable and smaller, so I liked that one better when it worked. I had noticed a few occasional intermittent times when it dropped connection, but I had assumed it was maybe a bit loose or something. I always use it for WODS because while my Fenix is great, the optical heart rate sensor has its limitations.

Saturday I noticed that it wasn’t connected, I did a brutally long and grippy WOD where my wrist was moving a lot. That type of movement and WOD is one of the most likely places to run into the limitations of the fenix, and it showed. I can assure you that my max heart rate for that WOD was absolutely not 109.

That evening, after we finished our running around, I searched the internet quick and saw that there have been reports of the HRM failing after changing the battery. I had changed my battery about a month ago and that’s when the intermittent drops began.

I went through Garmin’s troubleshooting steps in their support site with no luck in getting it to be recognized, so I hoped on the chat for customer support. I sat on chat for a while waiting for a response and then realized it was Saturday evening, so I decided to wait until Monday. It wasn’t that important that it had to be taken care of on a weekend evening.

This morning after Brooke left I got on chat again. This time after a few minutes I got a response and after answering a few questions Had a link to order a replacement for my broken device. They told me they’re out of stock right now and more are expected by June 10th. That’s longer than I’d like to wait, but that’s the way things are going, in general, these days. Who knew importing everything would be a bad idea? The customer support process was painless and pretty quick for me, so that reminded me again of why I bought a Garmin watch. My past customer service experiences with Garmin for my geocaching GPS was just as good. It’s a nice surprise to find that the good support hasn’t changed.