Garmin badges for past activities

26 May 2018

Bug or feature? You decide.

I was just casually checking out the Garmin badge leaderboard, when I realized, that one of my friends got way ahead of everybody. Looking into His points, it turned out, that He has marathon badges awarded for activities, that happened last year, waaay before the new badge system was released.

I contacted Him, and He told me the big hack: ... drumroll ... just star / favorite Your past activity, and the badges / points will be awarded. Yep, that simple.

Small note at the end: the approach is not working in 100% of the cases. First I thought that maybe there is a limit for the date, then I presumed, that maybe the activities synced from RunKeeper that needed manual editing are the ones that do not receive th badge. It is probably a combination of these and other factors, I don't know, didn't investigate any further.

Whether this is a bug or feature remains a question. I have not seen any comment from Garmin that would state, whether they intend to award activities older than the badge system release date. If they do, this is a feature fixing a bug. If not, this is a hack.