With Garmin Connect Still Down, Desperate Runners Buy Digital Mileage-Tracking Tools on the Street
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When Garmin Connect, a popular digital fitness tracking tool, shut down earlier this week, reportedly due to a ransomware attack, runners everywhere reacted with puzzlement and good-natured jokes. When the outage continued for a full day and then another with little explanation from the company, many of those same runners grew desperate.
Now, sources say, they’re turning to street dealers for their fix.
Hard numbers are difficult to come by, due to the nature of such transactions, but experts told Dumb Runner that the problem is real—and potentially dangerous.
“When you purchase a tool for tracking, analyzing and sharing health and fitness activities from a reputable company, like Garmin, you know what you’re getting,” said Mark Renton, director of the McGregor Institute, a trade group. “Buying a homegrown version from some random guy in an alley or through your car window is much, much riskier.”
Renton said he’s already heard of “dozens of cases” of distraught Garmin Connect users looking for a mileage-syncing fix on the streets and getting burned.
“One guy paid 20 bucks for what turned out to be a thumb drive full of someone’s wedding photos,” he said. “Another got lured into an abandoned gas station, where the supposed seller and his buddies worked him over and stole his GPS watch.”
“It’s not a pretty situation,” he said. “But these people are desperate.”
One of those desperate people, who asked to be identified only as Spud, said he knew that what he was doing was dangerous, but he felt he had no choice.
“I’ve been syncing my miles on Garmin Connect for as long as I can remember,” he said. “And then, suddenly, it’s gone? Not cool, man. Not cool.”
Spud said he laughed off the outage at first. But within hours, he began feeling tense and irritable.
“My hands were shaking,” he said, “and I began sweating. I kept checking, every few minutes, to see if (Garmin Connect) was back online. But I kept seeing the same error message.”
The next morning, Spud said, he awoke with a pounding headache and an uncontrollable twitch in one eye. That’s when he decided he needed a fix, whatever the cost.
“I drove downtown and cruised back and forth near the local running store,” he said. “Pretty soon I made eye contact with a guy and pulled over.”
The ensuing transaction went quickly, Spud said, and he was reasonably happy with the results.
“I gave the guy 50 bucks, he passed me a folded paper bag, and I found a quiet place to open it,” he said. “It wasn’t as elegant or user-friendly as Garmin Connect, but the stuff this guy gave me got the job done. I sat there, in an empty parking lot, and synced my miles.”
“My God, it felt good.”
Renton, the trade group spokesman, said Spud got lucky.
“Not every street deal goes down like that,” he said. “Trust me. I know runners everywhere are antsy without their Garmin Connect, but please—be patient. It’ll be back up soon, I’m sure.”
Asked whether runners could avoid the issue altogether by simply not tracking their miles digitally on a third party’s platform in the first place, Renton laughed.
“Sure,” he said. “That would work.”
