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Garmin "triangle of death" watch crash/reboot during race - caused by iPhone sync?

I was about half way through a race when the screen on my watch displayed the garmin "triangle of death". It was stuck like that for 90 sec, and then it went back to the activity data screen and I was able to resume. Unfortunately this means the full distance for the event didn't register, and my corresponding PRs won't be updated.

This was my first time running with my phone, I think next time I will make sure the BLE on my watch is turned off because I think it may have tried to sync with the phone or something and thats when the crash happened? not sure, has anyone else had this happen to them when running with their phone nearby?
  • There are a few posts about the 935 crashing if you do a quick search but I cannot recall if anyone has mentioned having their phone with them.

    I had one shortly after receiving the 935. I was running with the iPhone at the time. I was following a course and had a number of alerts active. I just put it down to the device getting overloaded. I usually run with my phone, but have not had a recurrence. Yesterday for example was a 17km run following a course, one of a number I've done since that crash, without any problem. I am open to it being caused by an iPhone sync, but not convinced.

    Perhaps if you would provide some more details about anything extra you've added to your watch, FW level, following a course/previous track etc?
  • Gotcha yeah, the watch is running v10.10.0.0

    I don't have any alerts set up on my watch besides phone call notifications. But my phone was on do not disturb and I didn't have any missed calls.

    I wasn't following a course or doing a training workout, it was just a normal outdoor run activity.

    I have strava live segments enabled, but my race did not go near any of my saved segments so I don't think they caused the issue.

    I also have Garmin running power enabled.

    I had finished a 1.5 mile warmup activity before the race, and I'm wondering if that could have possibly started loading to my phone mid-race? I'm not positive but I'm pretty sure my watch was paired to my phone during the race bc I typically have BLE on. I wonder if there's a way to see what time an activity was uploaded to garmin connect, would be interesting to see if my warmup run uploaded near the time I had the crash.

  • Probably something to take up with Garmin support then. I'd like to think that the device is 'intelligent' enough not to attempt an upload of a completed activity while another activity is in progress for no other reason than it imposes an extra load on the device.
  • I had a similar occurrence about a week ago on fw 10.10 - I was about 4 hours into a long ride following a course and running a Live Track. I received a text message notification on the watch, and it immediately went to the blue triangle (that was not the first notification I'd gotten on the ride). Power cycle just went back to the triangle, and it did not recover until I completed a hard reset. I think most likely the course + Live Track + notification on a long ride just got to be too much for the little fellow.

    No excuse though - dumping my data that far into a long ride was not cool. Would be great if Garmin would archive Live Track data as a back-up source in case of something like this.
  • Interesting about fw10.10, I thought maybe garmin might want to dig deeper but when I contacted them I just got a canned response with instructions on how to power cycle my watch, install to the newest firmware, and then clear out the watch data if the problem persists.

    Hope it doesn't happen again but going forwards I'm going to keep my watch disconnected from my phone during races.
  • I think it might be caused by Strava Live Segments. I thought it only synced my starred segments, but it looks like now it's syncing all popular segments in my area. I'm not sure how popular is determined but it seems like this could be pretty heavy so I turned off the "popular segments feature".