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Garmin’s new logging feature, Garmin Epic, is getting buried in the launch of the latest Fenix 9 watch, but it deserves a headline of its own. It’s a shareable digital travel journal for your big trip, being pitched by Garmin as the kind of thing you post after a major hike or race. Personally, I think that framing undersells it. Epic is also a great training-analysis hack, and that’s how I plan on using it for my upcoming marathon this fall.
First things first: Garmin Epics are not to be confused with Garmin’s older watch line, epix, with an “x”. This feature is Epic, with a “c”. The names are close enough that searching for one turns up the other, so double-check the spelling.
What is a Garmin Epic?
A Garmin Epic is a digital travel journal that combines your activities, maps, photos, and key health and performance metrics into a single interactive timeline you can revisit and share. With the Fenix 9 smartwatch, you can create and start an Epic directly from your watch. For older watches, you can still create Epics in the Garmin Connect app.
Once you create an Epic, you can see all activities on one map, photos, an activity feed, daily notes, and selected performance and health reports across the whole span. It’s a free Garmin Connect feature, and Garmin’s launch demo showed a Reports tab with sleep score, resting heart rate, and HRV status for the same dates.
Credit: Meredith Dietz
How to use Garmin Epic as a training tool
Again, although the launch of Garmin Epic is wrapped up in the launch of the Fenix 9, you don’t need that smartwatch to use Epics in the Connect app: You can find it under the Activities menu. You can also group past activities into an Epic after the fact, and that ability is what makes the training-hack angle work.
An Epic can run up to 92 days and keeps cumulative distance and calories along with sleep, recovery, and HRV status. That’s about 13 weeks, which conveniently covers a typical training block for a half-marathon-level event. Here are some ways to use it:
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Wrap a whole training block. Make one Epic per build, such as “Fall Marathon Build” or “Base Phase.” You get total volume and the recovery trend in a single view, and you can compare it against your next block.
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Review a training camp or big week. Garmin lists training camps as a use case: Group the days, see total volume, and check how fitness and recovery responded over time.
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Look back at a build after the race. Backdate an Epic across the last 10 weeks and see whether your HRV status and sleep held up. Then you can decide what to repeat for next time.
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Track a return from injury or a taper. Sometimes these are periods where the trend matters more than any single run.
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Use daily notes as a subjective log. “Legs heavy,” “slept badly,” “felt great.” The metrics show what your body did, but your notes show how it felt, which is usually what explains a strange week.
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Plan ahead. You can schedule up to five future Epics, up to 366 days in advance. Set up your next block before it starts.
Garmin Epic wasn’t designed to be a comprehensive training-analysis feature, so it’s not a flawless system. Still, while Epic is marketed as the place to relive your adventures, I’d argue the more useful trick is using it to zoom out and look for patterns in your training for next time.
