Garmin Edge 800 review

Another hugely useful feature is courses. Instead of automatically working out a route, the 800 simply directs you around a course you set. This means you can take a particular road – or avoid one – and still get the same turn indications as with the auto-routing mode. There are many websites where you can download courses other people have created, or you can easily create your own. This mode is also great for routes you ride regularly, including circular routes. You can choose to be alerted if you cycle off course, which is handy if you’re whizzing down a hill and miss a turn. Usefully, you can disable route recalculation, preventing the 800 from building a new route if you do go off course.

Training

The 800 allows you to race against yourself, by saving the data from the previous times you cycled a particular route. You can customise the timing screens to show how far or behind you are in terms or time or distance. There’s also a ‘virtual partner’ which you can race against, even if you haven’t ridden the route before. You set the speed at which the partner rides and try and keep up.

Yet another mode is Workouts. Using the Training menu option, you can build Workouts which have multiple ‘steps’. You set a particular goal for each one, be it time, distance, heart rate or something else from the numerous parameters. If you don’t want to build a Workout, you can use the Alerts option for a simpler indication of when you’ve reached a goal, say distance or heart rate. Alerts can also be warnings, so you can set maximum and minimum values for various parameters such as cadence – to warn you if you’re straining too hard up a hill with low cadence, for example.