Apple Watch: Outdoor Cycle Workout issue

... And tonight it did not log any speed or distance again. It worked for my morning ride, it worked for a short evening ride, but the ride home shows 0 (zero) distance..

The Apple Watch is connected to my iPhone ok. I did not change anything (settings, etc.) during the day.

For now I am writing this of as ****** software and hoping for Watch OS 1.0.2 to fix this.

.. And today it worked again. No changes, no nothing. Just a new day.

One guess could be battery on iPhone (I know, long shot..) that to save battery the iPhone does use GPS.. Or it could be GPS signal quality on the iPhone.

Really, just annoying that it works on and of. Again, hoping for a 1.0.2 soon.

Same issues here, watchOS 2 beta 2 doesn't fix that. Motion Calibration & Distance was switch off and on and no outdoor cycle measurement is happening 😟

Please don't discuss the betas here - it's not allowed under the Terms of Use and there's a risk your post will simply disappear.

The fact that this is continuing is very odd. I cycle to work 2-3 times a week and always record the ride as a Workout. So far, the Watch/iPhone combo has recorded all the activity correctly. I also record the rides with Runkeeper, just in case, and there are some (to my mind minor) variations in distance/pace measurement.

If a full reset to factory settings doesn't bring about any improvement, I'm wondering whether you have a faulty watch

I've had on and off experience with this. My sort of summary is that you need to have a bit of patience (and luck?) since it does not start showing numbers (speed/distance) for Outdoor Cycling. You sometimes need to wait a bit for it to start working.

I think the problem might be a combination of iOS and WatchOS and sometime iOS does not give enough "precision" or "location data" to the watch (I really don't know how the watch does to show the speed/distance if the data comes straight from the iPhone or if is sort of gets transformed/calculated on the Watch also).

So, no real answer or solution. Just that for me it works and previously it did not work and sometimes I start cycling and it shows "---" for Speed and Distance and when looking again later during the ride it has started showing those numbers.

Distance was working for me, for weeks and today it stopped. Still works for open ended walks but open ended bike ride no longer records or displays distance. And the comments don't seem to have found a work around. Should I take the time and effort to erase the watch and start over?

Hi all,

I was having this problem too. Turns out it was 100% the iPhone. The GPS chip was not working properly. Finally convinced Apple to replace it and now all is well. If you're in a big city, you might not notice the GPS is busted because cell tower triangulation is pretty close when you're standing still, but when you're moving fast it falls apart. Try driving with live directions and it'll flake out. That'll prove to you the GPS is not working properly. Good luck!

Hello!

I don't know if this is a valid thread anymore, but as I had the same issue with my Apple Watch's outdoor cycle activity and I didn't find a specifically helpful answer from this thread, I thought I'd tell everyone how my problem got solved. If moderators think this is not a necessary post, then it can be removed.

Firstly, I bought a used Apple Watch couple of months ago. It worked fine with my iPhone 5S when I was going for a walk or a jog. On the iPhone I used also Abvio's Walkmeter -app, and both the app and the Watch's outdoor walk/run worked simultaneously just fine. However, I didn't use the cycle activity, only walk and run.

Then I bought an iPhone 6S recently, and I had to pair the Watch with the new phone and because of this it for some reason returned to factory settings. It wasn't that big of an issue. When I took my bike for the ride for the first time after winter and tried to measure my rides the same way as I did with the walks and runs, I faced the same problem as in the first post of this thread: all I got was "----" for the speed and the distance. I used the Walkmeter at the same time as I did with walking and running and it was working as usual.

I read this thread and kept cycling with the Watch's activity on and with Walkmeter. I cycled for about 60km and it did not give me anythin else than the same "----". However, I noticed that regardless of this, it did show me afrer I finished the activity, that the best achievement (or exercise) was exactly the same what the Walkmeter measured. I think the Watch's activity app somehow got the data from the Walkmeter, even though they are not connected in any way as of my understanding.

Couple of days later after I had a quite long cycle, I decided to try the Watch's activity without the Walkmeter and for my surprise it just started to work! Then I downloaded Abvio's other app, the Cyclemeter (witch is practically the same as Walkmeter, but designed better for cycling only; the Walkmeter has an activity for cycling also, so there's no real difference between the two). The Watch worked with it too just fine. Then I had the courage to try it again with the Walkmeter and it worked too!

So all and all, I think it was just about the calibration. The Watch needed enough rides to learn some movements while cycling, or something like that. I really don't know of this is actually the case, but I got it to work like this. I didn't reset anything, not the Watch nor the Phone. I was just patient with it.

I hope this helps!

I have the same issue. I already unpaired then paired it again but still not fixef

This was the fix that solved my watch problem. Now I see the actual distance on my current workout that I didn’t see before. Many thanks!