How to turn off interval registration when creating laps? Feature or Bug?

Yes, this is especially annoying when doing strides at the end of a run. It would treat them as an interval workout. 

I don't know if this is your problem but if when you start the activity, a suggested workout is showing it will start that workout. First press the back button to clear workout and the press start to start the activity, 

Thanks, but no, it's not the suggested workout. I used to press the back button and when that didn't fix it I disabled the suggested workout. Support finally went ahead to send it to the development team. They came back asking if I have custom workouts on the watch because they think that the watch might randomly load and start an interval workout. No custom workouts on the watch though, so it's back to development.

Thanks. I suppose it sees the entire workout as an interval training then, and not just the strides, does it? Care to share a screenshot  of it?

Have you found a solution?

If your Run activity has auto lap enabled set up a separate Run activity with auto lap disabled. That way you’ll. Have one activity auto lapping when you want and another auto lapping at a predetermined point.

There have been lots of discussions over the years about this behaviour. Way back in time the initial behaviour was for auto lapping to be ignored whenever an interval workout was loaded. However, there was some complaints so the software was altered such that the auto lap that was set was left enabled thus in activities, as you found, will have both interval and auto laps recorded. 

No, unfortunately not.

Thanks, that's a good insight en possible workaround. It doesn't work for me though. I do my trainings in a running group, and at the start we don't know exactly know what the training will be. When we do intervals, it's often something like 2km slow run, then intervals and then 2km back to the starting point. I do want the auto lap at the start and end, and during the intervals it's just manual because they are less than 1km so the auto lap isn't triggered.

It's not the auto lapping that bugs me. It's the interval grouping in Garmin connect that's way off (see my screenshot in my original post, round 2+4 in interval 2. If you look at their speed, that's clearly recovery not running.

Dr Phil said:

If your Run activity has auto lap enabled set up a separate Run activity with auto lap disabled. That way you’ll. Have one activity auto lapping when you want and another auto lapping at a predetermined point.

There have been lots of discussions over the years about this behaviour. Way back in time the initial behaviour was for auto lapping to be ignored whenever an interval workout was loaded. However, there was some complaints so the software was altered such that the auto lap that was set was left enabled thus in activities, as you found, will have both interval and auto laps recorded. 

This topic is about not about loading a pre-programmed interval workout onto their device (if you read the OP, they explicitly said that is *not* what they do) and expecting auto lap to be disabled. It's about manually pressing the LAP button while running intervals (*) and the Garmin watch automatically categorizing laps as intervals (e.g. Run, Rest, Recovery, Warmup, Cooldown) in a way that ppl don't like.

(* to be clear, literally running with alternating periods of work and rest/recovery.)

Auto laps don't really have any effect on this feature, as far as I know.

JPCORNELISSEN said:

Who know if and where this can be switched off? Or is this a bug?

It's a feature, not a bug, you can't turn it off, and you're not the first person to complain about it.

What is Automatic Interval Categorization? (support.garmin.com)

During your workout, press the lap button whenever you transition between warmup, run, and rest periods. Pace will become a factor to determine your intervals.

So basically if you manually press the LAP button, and you run the manual laps at different paces such that Garmin thinks you're running intervals, it will try to automatically categorize your laps as intervals.

I don't think there's anything you can do about it except ignore the intervals or recategorize them manually in Connect.

Like the other person said, when I run a normal steady state run, but with strides at the end (pressing LAP at the end of each stride/rest period), my watch categorizes that as an interval workout. This is annoying because when I review the activity on my watch afterwards, I can't see the original laps, only the detected intervals. (Ofc I can see both in Connect.) (To be clear it's annoying bc I like to look at my 1k auto-lap splits for steady state runs.)

If you're curious what that looks like, let's say I run 6k + 4 x 15s strides (followed by a short run back home), with 1k auto-laps, pressing LAP after each stride/rest period. Disregarding the auto-interval categorization, I would expect the laps to look like this:

Lap 1: 1k
Lap 2: 1k
...
Lap 6: 1k
Lap 7: 15s
Lap 8: 5s
Lap 9: 15s
Lap 10: 5s
Lap 11: 15s
Lap 12: 5s
Lap 13: 15s
Lap 14: 5s
Lap 15: 700m

The activity might look like this in Connect after automatic interval categorization:

Warmup: Lap 1-6
1 Run: Lap 7
   Rest: Lap 8
2 Run: Lap 9
   Rest: Lap 10
3 Run: Lap 11
   Rest: Lap 12
4 Run: Lap 13
   Rest: Lap 14
Cooldown: Lap 15

The activity on the watch would look similar except with no text labels (just interval numbers) and it wouldn't be possible to expand grouped laps.

Additionally, for me, sometimes an activity will have its laps categorized as intervals on the watch, but not on the Connect website or app. (I think at one point I saw interval categorization in the website but not the app.) I think this behavior has changed a few times (not sure if on purpose or not.)

Currently, I'm seeing automatic interval categorization in all 3 places (the watch, Connect website and Connect app) at least for the latest activity that it was applied to (a short strides-only activity recorded a couple of days ago)