Does a benchmark run determine what recommended runs are in future?

Hi guys,

I recently got a Garmin forerunner 265. I’ve been running for around 2 years, but I’m very new to Smart watches. In terms of running stats, I only have payed attention to pace and time.

I am doing a half in May, so I added the event to my watch and decided to start a training plan. For my first run I was given a benchmark run, and I’m pretty sure I messed it up.

Firstly, I was testing out the watch and messing with it while running and I accidentally skipped my warm up after 3 minutes.

Secondly, I have a high heart rate even during light activity and I kept getting notifications that my heart rate was too high during the run. I wasn’t sure what to do so I started walking and pausing to try keep it down.

This run was meant to be testing the device, not running but I used my benchmark and now I’m concerned that it’s messed up any calculations as I am getting very slow runs recommended.