the Way of the Turtle

Thanks for the "Updated" Software, Garmin
Wednesday, July 6, 2016

I've been using a variety of Garmin Forerunners for around a decade now, with my current top choice being a 610 which can actually pass as a decent watch (unlike the older, blocky monsters... though if I ever get back to doing events that I expect to last longer than 7 hours, I will definitely break out the clunky 310XT.) At times I've been tempted by other brands, but I've always resisted because my Garmins work for me and  had something others didn't - the no-longer-supported Garmin Training Center, which allows me to store and refer to my data on my PC rather than on a web-site (though my data has also been getting uploaded to what is currently the Garmin Connect site.)

Last week I was informed that I needed to update to Garmin Express to enable my various GPS devices to communicate with Garmin Connect - and along the way I lost the ability to automatically load my data into Training Center. No surprise - Garmin has made it fairly clear that they consider Training Center to be defunct.

A bit of searching online suggested re-installing Ant Agent (the previous communication software) which I tried - but ANT Agent and Garmin Express really don't play nicely with each other, and even with ANT Agent reinstalled my data doesn't seem to be making it to Training Center - and it also didn't seem to be making it to Garmin Connect either. I thought about ditching Garmin Express but I suspect it's only a matter of time until they update things in such a way that ANT Agent won't work.

So thanks Garmin for making my life more difficult. Now whenever I want to store my data on my own computer I have to first upload it to your site and then download it back to my own PC. Not a huge problem, but one less reason to remain loyal to Garmin if the opportunity to try a different company's products pops up...

JMH