When a Garmin Forerunner 570 Crashes Mid Workout

Yesterday the Garmin Forerunner 570 crashed mid-workout while doing MAS intervals at a critical moment. It crashed while I was running at 4:35 per kilometre so I couldn’t reboot the watch with ease and re-start the workout.

I had to stop, type in the code, re-start the workout, and then start running again. This glitch teaches us two things. The first is that beta versions of Garmin software do, sometimes, crash, and the second, is that having a backup watch is always worthwhile.

In this case the primary watch was the 570 and the backup watch was the Apple Watch SE 3. I could easily use Coros as the backup watch instead given this most recent incident.

Whilst the Apple Watch does track workouts, and provide plenty of data it doesn’t track like Coros or Garmin. If you import a workout from Apple to Strava, and from Strava to Coros, then plenty of heart rate data points are missing, because the Apple Watch doesn’t track as comprehensively as true sports tracking watches. Specifically, Coros was unable to get an efficiency reading with the Apple Watch data, but was able to with the corrupted Garmin File.

When a Garmin device reboots mid-workout it backs up the workout, and treats resuming as if you had pressed pause and allows you to resume with ease. When cycling you might lose a few hundred meters, if you notice the crash. The same is true of this run.

I was monitoring pace, so I was checking the watch all the time. Suddenly I saw the blue triangle, and after 30 seconds the watch was rebooted. During a rest interval the impact would have been minimal.

By crashing and then rebooting the watch gave me an excuse to interrupt an interval in two ways. First it meant that I was pushing for nothing, since the device I was depending on wasn’t tracking, and second, because I was obviously looking for an excuse to slow down, and the watch gave me that excuse. I could easily have continued for a few more seconds, and resolved it during a rest interval.

I’ve been conditioned to workout for the watch, to some degree. I knew that the Apple Watch was also tracking, so I found an excuse to stop pushing myself.

Sometimes the devices we use read our minds and give us the excuse we were looking for, to take a break. I struggle with intervals, so if the watch gives me an excuse to take a little break I take it.