Garmin running power doesn’t work very well with Xert

I’ve been using a 2nd Xert account for running for a couple of months as I’ve been returning to running after a long break (and an injury). Posting this here in case anyone is considering using Garmin’s running power field: don’t.

In a nutshell, Garmin seems to really exaggerate power on hills. I’ve been noticing a big disconnect between perceived effort on flats vs hills for the same power level, and as I’ve started running on hillier routes I’m getting breakthroughs without trying for them.

I did some poking around and found this blog post which has some charts that appear to confirm that Garmin has proportionally much higher power readings on hills than some of the competing devices.
I’m using the Garmin Tri HRM strap with the running power field on a Fenix watch, which has the same analytics as the Garmin running pod (which is not a foot pod- it mounts on your waist).

The upshot is that these exaggerated hills inflate XSS significantly and throw off overall training recommendations. It was working much better when I was running mostly flat, and I’ll be ordering a Stryd to get better data, even though that will mean effectively starting over on my Xert running account.

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I used a Garmin waist running pod & found it wildly different to Stryd. The Stryd seems reasonable to how I would expect to perform when compared to others in my age group whereas the Garmin inflated my abilities markedly. Running a lot on a treadmill & principally using Zwift/Xert I needed a Stryd anyway & tend now to use that in combination with the Runcline app which shows me real time gradient adjusted power & other Stryd metrics on a screen size that I can actually see through all the sweat pouring off me…