Virtual Partner on 245 Series not showing time ahead or behind

This happened again today, its very frustrating. This time it told me that I was 1hr 18 mins either ahead or behind  from the very start of the run. There is clearly an offset of some kind being applied to the time. I'd appreciate it if this could be looked at or if anyone could confirm that "race an activity" works for them. 

Race an activity seems to use elapsed time rather than moving time - this is very frustrating and makes the feature pretty useless for some runs.  For example if I have a run where i need to stop at traffic lights for a significant time then depending on how long i need to wait either puts me ahead or behind of my previous activity.

Garmin - can you consider switching to movinng time for calculations?

When I had the problem it wasn't elapsed vs moving (although I can see that would also be iritating)... Mine was way off from the start

I managed to resolve it by turning the watch off and back on again (probably should've thought of that earlier!) 

I’ve got this, did you find a solution?

I turned the watch off and back on again. Seemed to fix it. It's not a feature I use very often so haven't checked it for a while. 

Old thread, but it's the only search result I've found for this bug. I've had it for over a year. I hardly ever use "race a previous activity", but it always seems to glitch as you describe - which may be why I don't use it. Occasionally, I try it again, and find it still doesn't work, so give up for another few months.

Ran today, 6 miles odd, and tried it. That prompted me to search for someone else with the same problem. In today's case, the moment I pressed "go" it showed me 1 hour, 13 minutes, 10 seconds ahead. If I ran a bit faster, it would say 1:13:08 ahead. If I ran a bit slower, it would say 1:13:12 - and change to behind. So it looked like, if I ran exactly in pace with my previous activity, it would think I was 1:13:10 behind. As you say, it somehow knew that this differential represented exactly on track, because faster than 1:13:10 behind, and it says "ahead" with white background, slower it says "behind" and changes to black background.

In the end, I finished the run 1:12:47 "behind". Sure enough, look at the actual run time, and compare it to the one I was running against, and I beat my previous time by 23 seconds.

I reboot the watch from time to time, mainly because it seems to stop detecting cadance if I don't do that. So it's not been that long since I did a reboot.

Very frustrating, and wish the good people at Garmin would fix it.

Yes, I wish they would fix it. I'm not convinced that powering the watch off and on again actually helps. I've noticed the exact same problem fairly recently and a restart didn't help.

I'm not sure Garmin monitor the forum though... an acknowledgement that there's an issue would be good. 

Garmin may not monitor the forum, but I'm surprised more users aren't reporting it. It makes me wonder if there's a fairly specific trigger for the bug so that only a few of us are having the problem. Either that, or it's a little-used feature on the watch.

I never used this. What's the use case? I am racing my past self to see gradual improvements?

If you're running the same route as before, you can go to the Training menu on the watch, and choose "Race a previous activity". Find the previous run you did in the watch's history, and run against it. The watch will show you how many seconds you are ahead / behind of your previous time as you run round your route. Say you want to pace yourself to come in a minute faster, you can see yourself running against a ghost competitor of your previous time. That's the theory - except it doesn't always work as we're discussing here.