Went for a 10k run yesterday through a local forest trail I hadn’t explored before. I rely on my Garmin Forerunner 245 to track pace and distance, but around the 4k mark, the GPS signal dropped and stayed lost for about 3 kilometers. The watch showed zero distance covered and pace was all over the place until I finally got out of the dense tree canopy. I’ve run in wooded areas before with no issues, so I’m wondering if this is a one-off glitch or if the dense canopy on this particular trail is just too much for this model. I’ve updated the firmware and tried resetting the watch, but the problem persisted. Is this typical for GPS watches in heavy forest cover, or should I consider it a hardware problem? Has anyone else experienced similar signal blackouts on Garmin devices, and how did you handle it? Would switching to a different model or brand help in these conditions?

That 3k stretch with no GPS sounds super frustrating, especially since you’ve run wooded trails before without issues. Dense canopy can really mess with GPS signals, but the Forerunner 245 usually handles it okay. Sometimes it’s just the specific tree density or terrain blocking the satellites more than usual. If you’ve already updated firmware and reset, it might just be the trail’s environment rather than a hardware fault.

One trick I’ve seen folks use is to start the watch outside the canopy and give it a solid GPS lock before heading into dense woods. Also, some runners switch to watches with multi-GNSS support (like GPS + GLONASS or Galileo) which can improve signal reliability in tricky spots. If you’re thinking of upgrading, that might be a good feature to look for. But if it’s a rare trail, it might just be a one-off glitch caused by the environment rather than your watch itself.