I apologize for presenting some street creds prior to comments about my experience with the Ionic- 41+ years of running- just went over 88,000 miles. Over the years I think I have run with about every running watch. The Ionic is my first experience with Fitbit.
I have been a Garmin guy since their first GPS watch(FR101- known as “the brick”). Over the last 3 weeks I have run with the both the Ionic and the Garmin VVA 3- some runs with a HR strap and others with wrist HR.
Overall, I am impressed. When I place the Ionic a little bit up above the wrist bone the HR readings most of the time are with 2-3 beats above my Garmin HR strap. There have been a few times when the Ionic would go nuts and zoom up into the 180’s on a run, while the Garmin was showing my normal 130-140 easy running HR. HR average on my runs the Ionic is usually between 3-5 beats higher- not bad.
GPS has been pretty solid. Most runs I do are between 7-10 miles. Many runs the GPS is within .02-.05 of the mileage reflected by my Garmin. (It should be noted, most of the routes I have run have been measured by more devices than I care to mention over several decades).
The big thing I notice is average pace reflected by the Ionic is usually about 6-10 seconds slower at the end of a run.
Music while running. Believe it or not, never ran with music until I got the Ionic. The set up with Pandora was trying at times, but finally figured out how to get 3 stations I like. I avoided running with music because of my concern for not being situationally aware, cars, etc. That has been resolved with the purchase of some AfterShokz bone sound head set. 2 hours for a full charge and over 11 hours of play time. I am not an audio file, but they sound and work great for me.
Geez, I can ramble. Summing up, not a bad running watch. Smart watch doesn’t compare with my Apple Watch, but for me the Apple Watch never provided reasonable comparisons to my various Garmin watches with running stats(HR, distance, avg pace).
As a guy who is closing in on 75, I love the tech stuff and often wonder how I ever got to run 17 min 5k’s back in my early 40’s after 10 years of running back in the early 80’s.
Keep Running, it works. Run 2-3 minutes of your race pace for over 90% of your runs, take rest days and you may be fortunate to stay on the roads and get to at least 100,000 running miles. Nick
Fitbit Product Experts Alumni are retired members of the Fitbit Product Expert Program. Learn more
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