Polar RS800G3 Heart Rate Monitor

I have had three of these watches. Long story; one I broke in the Army (not in a situation where it should have broken), one got badly scratched, and the third is also badly scratched. I started using Polar back in 1993, and have ALWAYS used a Polar HRM in my 23 100 mile races I have done since then. No one could compete. But now, two issues have arisen.

First, this watch just is not durable. It is designed for marathoners who will take it off except when working out. It is a "road watch." No rocks, sand or dirt allowed. Second, all of my 800s have had issues with communicating with the W.I.N.D. chest strap. I even bought some bah-bump cream to help out, and I still get wildly erratic readings in the first twenty minutes of my workout (tried all the tricks, spit, water, etc). 180 to 60 in ten seconds. Gah! Who needs that at the start of the Wasatch 100?

The older 600s and my wife's 625x is a better watch. Now that Suunto is a legitimate competitor, I am switching over. Can't sell the watches, but I do have two extra G3 units I'll eBay.

Not a great tool for Nordic Skate with the GPS 3:
Q. The Polar Protrainer software shows a 22.5 mile distance.
R. The Curve at the Open exercise option shows 14.0 miles.
S. The actual distance is 14.0 miles at the place where I skate.
T. The reason for the discrepancy in distance, I don't know.
U. I reset the watch, just in case that was the problem. It didn't fix it.
V. The last eight (8) times I had the same problem. I tried different places.
W. It doesn't measure the accurate distance when using for Nordic Skate.
8. I measures the heart rate, the time, speed, and ascent.

This is supposed to track independently the distance from the body motion. It does not.

This is certainly the top of the line for polar, no doubt at all about that, but I find the use of the watch extremely cumbersome, even when done on polar performace 5 and then transferred to your watch.

The screen on these is VERY soft. Contemplate hard on going to zagg.com or someplace similar to get scratch protective films made for it when you first buy it. Mine has a pair of huge obnoxious scratches on it from a car door.

The software does require some steep learning curves. You will have to manually delete a lot of heart rate spikes (there is a feature to do this; suffice it to say that a heart rate of 2000 actually does get recorded onto the watch.) Heart rate spikes are much more common than I expected.

The watch did help me in improving my fitness. For me, I will transition to a Suunto T6, and use Peak 2 Peak software instead, which is Mac compatible.