After not even four months of usage, my Garmin GPS watch has stopped working. It still works as a regular watch, but no longer record distance. It would pick up satellite signal and count the time as I start moving, but the distance remains zero. At first, I thought perhaps I pressed some wrong sequence of buttons and, since I was out for a walk, I simply stuck with a rectangular path for which I know the distance. The next time it was a run and I wasted some minutes to try to "fix" it. Luckily I did not waste too much and it still turned out to be a decent run. Afterward, I simply mapped the route using DailyMile.com's tools. It is a bit tedious but it works fine.
I looked at the Garmin manual, online, and it did not offer much useful troubleshooting info for my scenario. The most I can do is shut down the device and that I did, to no avail. What I read next in the online forums only disheartened me. It seems some files got corrupted on the GPS watch and while it is possible to re-install the files the action can only be done via a Windoze machine, which I do not have at home. Argh! It is not a life-and-death situation so I decided to write to Garmin tech support and wait for their answer, which is supposed to come in 3 business days. In the mean time, I will just run without a GPS watch. I did it for more than two years, it is not that difficult. I already have a few routes plotted out in DailyMile. While it means I will need to stick to the route, it is no biggie. The running is the important part here, how precisely I record it is secondary.
Still, I refused to believe there is no way to reset the device, back to factory default if it comes to that. I Googled again and this time found the link at
https://support.garmin.com/support/searchSupport/case.faces;jsessionid=2066DB0E5EB57DB81D9FC438C8AF99FF
Sure enough, there IS a way to reset the thing. I tried it and even though it was already past 11 P.M. and snowing lightly outside, I just had to verify that all was well again. Yessirree Bob, all is well again in Qaptain Qwerty's running life.