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Treadmill distance way off, calibration making things even worse.

So, of course, you can never know if a treadmill is counting the distance perfectly. But the ones I've been using for years have reported distances consistantly, and on par with my outdoor running distance/time. And my FR 235 did a good job estimating Treadmill distance, consistently reporting around 0,95 km per 1 km on the teadmill.

The FR 945 is a completely different story. It started of recording about 1,4 km per 1 km on the treadmill on my standard 5 km @ 4:30 min/km. Using the Calibrate after saving function doesn't make things any better, actually they are getting worse! Today (fw 2.80 on the watch) every 1 km on the treadmill was more than 2 km on the watch, resulting in a world record over 10k at 21:19 min - WOHOOO!  Disappointed

As I understand the concept of calibrating, the watch should take the distance I put in when calibrating, and use it together with the number of steps measured for the same workout to get a new stride length for better treadmill distance calculation in the future? Or does the calibration feature only edit the distance for that specific run? 

The only setting that I've found that could mess things up is the optional manual stride length for walking in Garmin connect app, but I have that one of, and it shouldnt be relevant for tredmill running nayway?

This problem seems widesperad on the FR245, is it equally bad for everyone on FR 945?

  • Is this a problem with all Garmin watches?  I just returned a Forerunner 45 because of the treadmill discrepancy - I went through all the recommendations and nothing worked for me.  Actually the calibration seemed to make it worse.

    I am not a runner, I just do small distances on the treadmill and post them in a group in Strava; but when a 2 mile run was reported as less than a mile I thought it was enough.  I loved the watch and the statistics at the website, but that issue was a deal breaker.


    I'm back with my old TomTom Spark, which reports numbers that match my treadmill.  Unfortunately, the battery does not last more than 24 hours, and that's why I was trying a new watch.  I guess I'll just get a new wristband for it.

  • The same issue with indoor walking. Setting a custom stride length does nothing and Gargmin does nothing. Probably the last Garmin device I will own and I have had several of them. Vivoactive 4