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Garmin recording time but not distance

Former Member
Former Member
I went out on my first road bike ride of 2018 and for some reason Garmin has only recorded the time, not the distance and not the route. Can anyone shed some light on this? I used my Garmin Vivoactive HR to record the ride which I have used to successfully record rides in 2017 so I assume something has changed in some settings somewhere but I can't figure out where. :(
  • First, you'd have a better chance of constructive response if you posted it in the Vivoactive HR forum.

    But to the point:
    When the watch is recording time and not distance, this usually means that GPS is off. Make sure it is turned on for the activity profile you are using.
    One more question: Do you have a speed sensor on your bike?
  • Former Member
    0 Former Member over 7 years ago
    Thank you for your reply. GPS is switched on which is why I thought it might be an issue with Garmin Connect rather than the Vivoactive HR. I wondered if there was something in the privacy settings that might stop it logging my route.
  • Is the activity visible on your watch? Does your watch show distance for the activity?
  • Former Member
    0 Former Member over 7 years ago
    The plot thickens! The activity is visible on my watch and it does not show distance, only time. I must have pushed the wrong button or something. What a wally.
  • Former Member
    0 Former Member over 7 years ago
    I have encountered the same problem with my Vivoactive HR. A bike ride on Sunday everything bar distance recorded. Just done a morning snowboarding and laps shown but no distance. Something not right. It is recording fine in January when I was last here snowboarding.
  • Former Member
    0 Former Member over 7 years ago
    Good to know it's not just me then. I'll maybe post over in the Vivoactive HR forum.
  • I knew this is a pretty old issue, but I had encountered this issue as well, after half an hour spent with support online chat, finially got it resovled.

    Basically have to go through these steps:

    1. Power off your watch and restart
    2. Take a walk outside see if the GPS signal can be picked up again
    3. Back to the CONNECT app to see if there's a map shown for the just recorded activity
    4. If there's a problem to pair the device after restart, the best luck is retrying the entire pairing process including the forget device from phone, restart the watch while restarting the phone, eventually it should be paired.

    Not ideal but glad my old vivoactive HR watch is still functioning well.

  • Thank you for posting this process, it seems to have fixed my watch not picking up my miles during my last two runs. Amazing how addicted I am to this watch, and how it affected my last 2 runs without the GPS picking up my distance! Thanks again.

  • Please tell me how you fixed this

  • Garmin 745 was stopping recording distance mid way through activities. Tried the on /off/ reset. Tried firmware update in GRMIN express . Tried GPS 'Saturation' (I.e. Waiting for a while before setting off). It was GPS+ Glonass issue. Switched to just GPS for runs and works fine.

    Had same issue for 'walks'' and realised you need to change GPS setting for each activity.