No one is buying either of these in 2026*. Unless you are me. And you got a Forerunner 55 for £60 on Vinted. So these are just observations and notes for my benefit really.

• It turns off and on so quickly! To be fair, I didn’t often need to restart my Apple Watch and have only got in the habit of restarting the Forerunner after charging because of this bug.
• I can almost do my base level of exercise and charge once a week going from 80% to 20% battery.
• On that note, it’s a little depressing that I got this so I had the battery to do longer runs again and immediately injured my knee doing a 30k. Fortunately my knee is much better now and I’m back at half-marathon distance already
• I like that Garmin tracks Intensity Minutes. My base level of exercise is based on hitting 75 minutes of vigorous activity and then doing the same amount of strength because I didn’t think I could fit in 150 minutes of moderate exercise. I’ve never counted all the dog walking so it’s been interesting seeing my actual Intensity Minutes end up much higher - last week I had 551 Intensity Minutes made up of 113 moderate and 219 vigorous (which count double).
• WormNav is pretty cool. I have found an issue where it appears to get a GPS lock, but then isn’t actually updating or tracking. A restart will help. I suspect where I start might be in a GPS dead spot because I’ve noticed the same issue with Mappily. Mappily is a closer match to WorkOutDoors which is a fantastic Apple Watch App. I’m going to play about with Mappily and WormNav since there are pros and cons to both: WormNav can have a white background which is very visible, it also refreshes a bit faster; Mappily has a cadence field and having some context (background maps) for the route is very helpful.
• Buttons are great. I don’t miss a touch screen.
• I don’t miss the altimeter - it was great novelty value for steps climbed when moving my daughters from third floor flat to third floor flat, etc.
• The MIP screen is fine for me. I love being able to glance at my wrist and see Pace, Cadence, etc without fully having to raise my wrist.
• The vibration is more noisy than vibratory. Apple’s vibration is a LOT stronger and more discrete. But it is enough to wake me up.
• It’s a round display so I’m using a round watch face, like how on the Apple Watch I used a square one.
• The heartrate monitor on the Forerunner 55 is a billion times better. I thought the Apple Watch was bad just because it was my wrist. Nope.
• The Apple Watch is still my favourite Apple product. Being able to run ssh commands and web-browse from your wrist is pretty amazing even if not really necessary.

Since the Series 3 was a couple of years old when I got it I thought of replacing it with an equivalently old device such as a Coros Pace 3 or a Garmin Forerunner 165. I was also interested in “something different” like a Suunto Run or 9 Peak Pro. I.e. watches around £200 new, but that can be found for £150 on Vinted, but then realised there are so many Forerunner 55s it is easy to pick a barely used one up cheap (it seems a lot of people buy them to run a marathon and then discard after one season). It is my price point after all as nothing really changes; £37 of the £60 was contributed by my Dad for my birthday.

* - Especially since recently Garmin finally replaced the Forerunner 55 with the 70

At roughly three per week that’s six years of workouts which feels about right; Only more recently have I made a point of balancing running with strength workouts.

The Nike Training Club application really seems to struggle to sync this number of activities and has lost a few; According to the Strava API I have done 1055 workouts (Yoga + Workouts), not all of those are Nike Run Club, but most definitely are so NTC has probably lost about 40 workouts in all.

Asides from that though, I 100% rate and recommend it as a free fitness application.

Quick/hacky summing of my workouts thanks to strava-ruby-client:

irb(main):093> sports = {}
=> {}
irb(main):094* client.athlete_activities(per_page: 30) do |activity|
irb(main):095*   sport_type = activity.sport_type
irb(main):096*   if sports[sport_type]
irb(main):097*     sports[sport_type] += 1
irb(main):098*   else
irb(main):099*     sports[sport_type] = 1
irb(main):100*   end
irb(main):101*   sleep 1
irb(main):102> end; 0
=> 0
irb(main):103> sports
=>
{"Workout" => 363,
 "Run" => 1782,
 "Yoga" => 692,
 "Swim" => 25,
 "Kayaking" => 1,
 "Walk" => 7,
 "EBikeRide" => 2,
 "Skateboard" => 2}

I’m actually up to 1003 now