Garmin Woes

So on Saturday, about 14 or so miles into my trail run, I noticed that my Garmin 305 had stopped working. Oh well. Out of battery. Or so I thought. I got home and cradled the device – but it did nothing. Nada. Blank screen. No “Battery Charging in Progress” message. Not a big deal. I’ve seen this before. Time to dust off Garmin Forerunner 305 troubleshooting guide:

• Trouble charging: The symptom is you plug your Garmin into its cradle and it does nothing. No messages. It appears that you running buddy in fundamentally dead. Panic? Nope. The first thing to check are the little brass contacts on the back of your Garmin. Perspiration (okay okay – sweat) will cause them to corrode and turn dark/black in color. If this is the case, take a pencil eraser and clean the contacts. Plug your Garmin back into it’s cradle and voila! Everything should be back to normal!

• Soft Reset: That didn’t do the trick? No problemo. Time to pull the old Soft Reset out of the bag. To reset your device, you are going to need to press the “Mode” button and the “Reset” button simultaneously. Hold them down for three seconds and then release the buttons. Press the “Power” button. Your device should turn on with all data still intact.

• Hard reset:  Okay. That didn’t work. Now things get a little trickier. The next thing to do is to perform a Hard Reset. But – one word of warning – if you perform a hard reset, you *could* lose all of your data on your watch. To perform a hard reset, press the “Power” , “Mode”, and “Reset” buttons simultaneously for a few seconds. When your device powers up, it will be in it’s pristine out of the box state.

•  What else? Or maybe you can be like me. All of these tried and still nada. I have found Garmin support most helpful. Frustrating to get to, but helpful. Give them  a call. Just be  ready to wait 30 minutes or more to speak to a person. So – make sure you’ve tried all the cleaning and reset sequences first. It would be ashamed to make contact and be  sent way to try this stuff!

Up tomorrow – replacement options. Unfortunately this tells you what happened to my Garmin.

Oh – on the running front – work and family kept me from getting out yesterday. Oh well. Once in a while the family deserves it…..