I thought Garmin's new Epic feature was a glorified hiking diary until a 5-day, 70-mile Scottish hike changed my mind
Turns out, there's more to your outdoor adventures than pace and elevation
I’m used to hitting ‘Start’ on my Garmin watch when I head out on the trails and getting a wrap-up of my performance afterwards, but on a recent five-day trek around Perthshire, I decided to properly test the brand’s new logging feature.
Epic promises to bring every step, stat, and sleep into one cohesive snapshot on my roughly 70-mile hike. Using my Garmin Fenix 9 Pro for this test, I expected a digital diary, but instead I got real-time progress tracking, easy livesharing with family, and a better understanding of how my fitness has changed over the last year.
What is Garmin Epic?
Garmin Epic (not to be confused with Garmin's Epix smartwatch) is a new feature introduced with the Fenix 9 and Fenix 9 Pro. It’s a logging feature that lets you group multiple activities into one snapshot, and it’s also available on the Enduro 4 and MARQ Gen 3 watches.
You’ll find Epics in the Garmin Connect app under Activities, and you can create one for up to 92 days. When you start an activity, it will automatically add it to your current Epic.
All your activities will still show up as individual workouts in your news feed, but you’ll also see their stats grouped in the Epic for cumulative totals of hours, distance, ascent, pace, and calories.
You can add photos and share your Epic with friends, although don't expect a slick, Instagram-ready highlight reel. For now, this is primarily a performance-tracking tool, rather than a social media feature.
Taking the Epic on an epic adventure
Epic is retrospective, so when it first came out, I created logs for two big treks I took last year: the 75-mile Cumbria Way and the 80-mile trek to Everest Base Camp. That gave me a chance to see how it looks, but hiking on the Cateran Trail was my first opportunity to use it properly as a live feature, and I found it really useful.
I set up my Epic on the train to Perthshire and added the GPX file for the entire route in seconds. When I arrived in Blairgowrie to start my hike, the Epic was already in the activity, and I could share a Live Tracking link with my family via WhatsApp, which I did.
Once I hit Start, everything just worked like I was tracking any hike, but when I arrived at my first overnight stop in Kirkmichael after more than six hours trekking through the forest, I was able to see how much of my intended route I had completed in red, and how much remained in pink.
Over the next four days, I crossed remote glens and high moors without encountering a single other person. It was easy to lose track of time, but as the red line grew longer and the pink line shrank, I could always get my bearings at a glance and assess how much ground I’d covered.
After long days when my feet were throbbing, seeing my remaining distance shrink gave me a real sense of achievement and motivation.
At the end of each day, I could also check Garmin's training metrics, including Training Readiness and Acute Training Load (ATL), which helped me understand how my body was responding to several consecutive long days of walking. My Endurance Score also steadily increased as the trek progressed.
I don't always wear my watch to bed on a trek like this; after all, I have a certain number of miles to cover and a set number of daylight hours to do it in, no matter how I sleep.
But I decided to do so for the duration of the test, and access to my Sleep Score and Sleep Duration vs Need was actually motivating, even if it just confirmed how restorative my sleep was.
That said, I questioned the sleep-tracking algorithms when, after five consecutive days of hiking, my Evening Report recommended a 55-minute Base Run for the next day. No amount of restorative sleep kept me from my well-earned rest day.
The bigger picture
The most interesting discovery came when I compared my Cateran Trail stats with those from the Cumbria Way, a similarly long trek I'd completed the previous year.
I'd felt noticeably better during and after the Cateran Trail than any of my long treks last year, but I initially wondered whether this route had simply been easier. The data suggested otherwise. The Cumbria Way was only about 10km longer and involved about 600m more ascent, not an enormous difference spread across five days.
What really caught my attention was my pace. I walked almost three minutes per mile faster on the Cateran Trail while maintaining the same average heart rate. That suggested a genuine improvement in my cardiovascular fitness over the past year, something I might not have appreciated without being able to compare the two adventures side by side.
The verdict
Garmin Epic is clearly beneficial if you’re training for a race, but it probably won't transform the way you hike, and if you're only interested in tracking day walks, you won't find it essential.
But if you regularly take on multi-day adventures of any kind, train across different disciplines, or enjoy looking back at your performance over time, I think it's a genuinely useful addition to Garmin Connect.
I particularly liked being able to compare entire treks rather than scrolling through individual activity records. It gave me a better sense of how my fitness has developed and a little extra motivation on the trail.
I'm heading out on a couple of ski trips this winter, and I've already set up my Epics to record my total vertical descent, number of runs, and time on skis. After five days of hiking, I'm curious to see what five days on the slopes will tell me.
Read more about Garmin’s Epi feature here.
