Tuesday, February 7, 2012

My Love/Hate Realtionship with my Garmin 405

How did I used to live without a cell phone? The same way I used to live without a garmin! but once you get hooked on these little buggers you're done for! They are like crack I tell you...

My Garmin forerunner 405 has been giving me hell since OCT.... and it's been a long 4 months of mixed emotions.

At first it was little stuff like beeping low battery even though the battery was 100% charged.

Then it started messing with my races! The first one was during Jason's half marathon where I was going to help pace him for 10 minute miles and the watch shit the bed a mile into the race. I was so mad but at the same time glad I wasn't really racing the race myself, so I didn't care too much (selfish I know). When it came time to my own race I did care though. I wanted to PR at my half in Nov. and I locked the bezel before the race and it froze on the time screen never letting me start it. Big FAIL for the day even though I PRed without the help of the little computer.  When I got back home after the race and put it back on the charger it came back to life and I forgot about how much I hated the thing!

I used it for some training runs and during the month of dec and I thought all had returned to normal. That my garmin finally decided to behave itself...

WRONG! All of Jan. I have wanted to stomp, kick, jump on, and kill my 405!!


The sad story goes like this:

1. put on charger all night = 100% charged
2. take off charger and still says 100% charged
3. walk outside and start the timer after finding satellite - beeps at me 0% charged - WTF!!! I will then attempt to run anyhow and see how far I can make it. Sometimes the entire run or sometimes not. That is when the name calling and swearing begins ...

or

4. 10 minutes into a workout the thing continues to turn itself on and off! And it keeps turning itself on and off for hours! I can't tell you how annoying/embarrassing this is! At haines point riding for an hour and half: beep, beep, beep. Doing hill repeats: beep beep beep. Tempo runs: beep, beep, beep and no that's not me hitting my splits.

I had enough and just when I thought I was going to throw the watch as far as I could, I did the adult thing and called garmin to see what the heck was going with this POS of a watch!!

To my surprise they sent me a set of simple instructions to set my watch back to the default settings and to update the software on it. And to my surprise it worked like a charm and I have no clue why I waited for long to call them?!?!?!


Anyhow, I'm sorry I was mean to you. Are we ok now?


Happy Tues All :)

9 comments:

  1. Garmin really does have amazing customer service. I probably should have tried that before I threw mine against a wall and shattered it this summer :)

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  2. garmin customer service is the bomb!

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  3. I'm so glad it's working again.
    I love the drawings on your pictures. I'm cracking up.

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  4. I'm glad your watch is working again!

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  5. Glad you got it working again!!

    I had some issues with my Garmin 405 last year. In fact, the first day I had a problem with it was IMWI. The bezel was locked and wouldn't unlock. AHHH!!! Luckily my wife had her 305 and I borrowed that for the race. I, unfortunately, did not have good luck with Garmin at all. Repeated emails and online contacts when unanswered. I ended up opening it up and fixing it myself. The contact for one of the buttons was corroded from too much sweat (gross). Some rubbing alcohol fixed that. And now just today, I swapped out the broken wrist band with a replacement. I am determined to run this thing into the ground (pun intended).

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  6. I am glad your watch is working now. I love your mad paint skills! :) :)

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  7. I've never had problems with my Garmin working (knock on wood) but glad to see there is an easy resolution!

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  8. Totally hilarious. Thanks for the laugh, and for making me feel like I'm not the only one to assign too much anger and blame to a running gadget (don't get me started on the time my iPod died at mile 17 of a long run ... ).

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