I have been collecting this data and been reading articles for some time about the discrepancies in my Apple Watch 6 vs my Garmin fēnix 5x. However, I have not finished all of that yet and felt compelled to post this quickly as I ran across a very puzzling issue today that I am not even really sure where to start but this is how it went.

On my run today I started both watches at the same time as always waiting for the Apple Watch to do it’s 3 second countdown and then I hit start on my Garmin. Today was colder out so I had a jacket over both watches so to that point I only looked once at both watches to see how the time was as I knew I needed to make a loop (or thought I did) because I wasn’t going to hit the mileage I was shooting for. However, the Apple Watch was back at the main screen and not in the Workout screen. This is only irritating as I had to type in my pin to get into the watch. I thought for sure then it must have stopped timing but this had also happened earlier in the week and once I clicked back into the Workout app I could see the time was still ticking away. I did the same thing today and glanced that it was still running but didn’t look close enough to know what the time said or anything.

Fast forward 1 more mile and I was at the end of my run and I stopped my Garmin first and then went to my wrist and stopped the Apple Watch as I always do. However, looking at the activity summaries I noticed the Apple Watch said I only ran a fraction of the time and distance I knew I was at.

Now I have had some discrepancies before now but never such a big one

Knowing that didn’t seem right I dug into the details of the Apple Watch the GPS shows me stopping this half way through the run 🤔. I would say oh it must have just shut off but I know with 1 mile to go I looked at it and the time was ticking away so if anything where was that portion of time.

I gotta have the details…

Now as a person running with two watches I get I am a little strange but this was even more boggling than the research I have been looking into on just GPS accuracy for each watch. So I looked at some more of the details and found a couple interesting points.

Garmin fēnix 5x

Apple Watch 6

You can see that both the Garmin and Apple Watch have the same start and stop times so I was correct at seeing the time clicking away when I had to re-enter my pin with 1 mile to go. However, that only goes to being more odd as the Apple Watch says the total time was 21:18 (head scratcher I know). Also, it says it didn’t have enough data for my Heart Rate. Something wasn’t working right the whole time because I would think even for a 2.5 mile run that would give it enough and I wear the watch pretty snug so it isn’t like it bounces around when I run. I guess Apple didn’t think I my ”effort” was enough to be recorded for at least the last 3.7 miles but really the whole thing for HR perspective.

Hopefully, I will get to finishing my post around the GPS accuracy at some point but it probably won’t be any silver bullet as shockingly there is a lot of information but maybe only a couple good explanations. Until then I will hold off my true thoughts on both I will keep wearing them 😆. ⌚️ ⌚️