Garmin Forerunner 970 crashes during races and training

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Garmin Forerunner 970 users report crashes after activities or runs. The issue has been raised by multiple Garmin customers on the support forums.

For your reference, we have listed the various threads on which the issue of frequent crashes on Garmin Forerunner 970 have been reported by Garmin users.

These users are dispersed all over the world. So, you have user complaints pouring in from Australia, Europe and users in the United States.

Let us, first of all, list the user complaints as a matter of reference.

Forerunner 970 users report that the watch reboots during runs or activity training sessions. The behaviour of the watch is common.

In particular, we find that the user’s exact report of the issue is interesting. The user of Garmin Forerunner 970 reports (Forerunner 970 crashes during races and training – anyone else?):

  • Zugspitz Ultratrail (106 km) on June 13, 2025
    The watch froze around kilometer 65. I tried restarting multiple times, but nothing worked. I had to start a new activity to continue recording, which means I couldn’t track the race as a whole.
  • Marburg Night Marathon (42.2 km) on July 5, 2025
    The watch froze 2–3 times during the race. After restarting, it continued recording, but this made the experience very frustrating and unreliable.
  • Today (July 13, 2025)
    The watch crashed again – twice in a row – during a regular training run. In this case, I was also listening to locally stored music via Bluetooth headphones. Not sure if this is related, but worth mentioning.

Effectively, the frequent crashes or frozen watch interferes with tracking races or activity training.

Garmin is aware of the issue.

Garmin rolled out a new firmware update 12.70 on 19 August 2025. It believes that the latest firmware update resolves the frequent crashes of Forerunner 970, especially during hike runs.

The user feedback is awaited. It remains to be seen if this issue of crashes of Forerunner 970 is resolved with the firmware version 12.70 released in August 2025.

Garmin released an updated firmware version 12.72 on 9 September 2025. This firmware update is expected to resolve the issue of voice alerts on the Garmin Forerunner 970.

We will keep you posted about the issue and the feedback of users after a purported fix has been released by Garmin for the Forerunner 970 smartwatch.