What the hell is going on? I got up at 5:30am for a 6am start on a nice 20km run on the country roads near my house. It seemed my Garmin Venu was maybe still asleep and having some sort of wild dream! At my peak, the smart watch had me putting in two minute miles – a far way off from my average of around ten minutes per mile.
I thought maybe some update had changed it to metric on me. Even then, I was putting in way too much mileage in too short a time. Somewhere along the route, the watch seemed to catch up to me but the damage was done. The 20km run was measured at 31. My times were all pretty close to world records for the 5k, 10k and half marathon.
As you can see from the photo, Garmin started my run quite a distance from my starting point, then kept going in the opposite direct before turning around and heading cross-country to find me. The map on the left side of the image is the Fitbit version, perfectly accurate (click image to enlarge).
On my Garmin account, I was able to manually adjust the distance. However, on Strava, I ended up deleting the run out of integrity. I couldn’t find a way to manually edit the run and leaving it up would be just plain wrong.
Is My Garmin Venu Defective?
After I settled in for a little internet research into what the problem might be, I could only come across one thing. I’ve had this Garmin Venu since Christmas, 2021. I more than often don’t wait until the GPS has been connected before hitting the start button on my runs. The result is almost always an accurate measurement, regardless.
All I could find on the world wide web was that not waiting for the go-ahead from the watch to start your activity could cause inaccurate readings. Even more disturbing was the number of people who complained that their watch never connected and had to be returned. I don’t like to return things.
After a bit of panic, my watch did connect properly to the GPS. I would make sure this was the case on my next run…
The Same But Different
My next run was my for-now regular Sunday night run following hockey at the University of Guelph. I waiting for the watch to connect and started out on my jaunt through the quiet streets of Guelph, Ontario.
What showed on the display during the run didn’t seem out of the ordinary. In fact, all seemed to be back to normal. That is, until I got home and took a look at what Garmin had mapped for me.
This time, the distance, time and pace were accurate (as backed by the Fitbit Charge 4 I wear on my other wrist). However, the map took some wild deviations. Everything was great as I left the university grounds, heading west on Stone Road and north on Edinburgh. But, when I got to Wellington Street, I went straight through while the Garmin took a trip to the west, totally off-roading.
In the image, the accurate map from Fitbit is on the right. The Garmin version on the left with it’s renegade side trips (click image to enlarge).
Relief
Out of total coincidence (or not), an article popped up on the Google news feed on my cell phone. This article by DC Rainmaker told the story. It seems that all smart watches with a certain Sony chipset were having issues from about June 28 to July 5. My watch was included in the affected list.
My watch wasn’t defective and that was certainly a relief. The problem had been resolved and that also was certainly a relief. They have promised that a fix is now in place and this issue should never arise again. However, they also said the same thing 18 months before so we’ll see…