RuckTrack is a Connect IQ Device App built specifically for rucking, weighted-vest walking, loaded hiking, and treadmill incline-walks. Everything below is in the version on the store today. Nothing here is planned or coming soon.
The start screen shows your pack weight, terrain, GPS quality, and heart rate. Hit START and you're recording. No menu trees, no GPS-lock gate. Terrain sits right above the pack weight in the same grammar, so the two numbers the calorie model leans on are both in front of you before you set off, and you are less likely to start a trail ruck still set to Road.
QuickLoad lets you pick your last-used weight, a saved preset, or a one-time custom load. Presets are managed right in the load menu: Add Preset saves the weight you dial in and applies it on the spot, Delete Preset removes one, and each preset remembers its own unit (lb or kg), so you can keep "Daily 30 lb" and "Long ruck 20 kg" side by side. In the weight picker, quick presses accelerate the steps, so a big load takes seconds to dial in rather than dozens of clicks.
Every one of the seven screens is drawn by hand: a custom number typeface, color-coded zone arcs, a pulsing heart, faded dividers. It's the most polished watch experience of any rucking app on Connect IQ. On round watches, page titles and footers curve onto the bezel, and the heart-rate ring dims to spotlight the zone you're in. Swipe or use UP/DOWN to move between pages.
Treadmill Auto drops the Effort page, since vertical speed and elevation aren't meaningful indoors and its pace would be raw wrist-pedometer noise, which leaves six indoors. Treadmill Manual keeps all seven, with a Pace page in Effort's place.
You can also switch pages off. From 2.12.0, Settings carries a Pages entry listing every screen the current mode offers, each with its own switch. Turn off the ones you never swipe to and they leave the rotation, so a two-page ruck is a perfectly reasonable setup. The parent row tells you how many are showing, the running order itself never changes, and the last page standing refuses to switch off so you can't end up with a blank activity. Pages is in the mid-activity Settings menu as well, which is where it tends to earn its keep, since the page you keep swiping past is usually the one you want gone right then. The change applies on the next frame, without pausing.
Watches with a transflective MIP display (the fēnix 6 Pro and fēnix 7 families, fēnix 8 Solar, Enduro 3, Forerunner 255 and 955, and the rest of the 64-color fleet) open the live screens in a light theme, dark text on white. Those displays reflect ambient light instead of emitting their own, so a light page is easier to read in bright sun, which is where most rucks happen. If you prefer the dark look, Settings carries a Theme entry on those watches, before or during an activity. AMOLED watches stay dark and don't get the setting, because a mostly-white screen on an emissive panel costs battery and risks burn-in.
Generic profiles like Walk and Hike don't know your pack weight, so they under-credit a loaded carry by 10 to 20 percent per the published research. RuckTrack uses the Pandolf load-carriage equation to compute calories from body weight, pack weight, walking speed, terrain grade, and surface type. The numbers reflect what your body actually did.
Five terrain coefficients: Road (1.00), Gravel (1.05), Trail (1.20), Sand (1.50), Snow (2.50). Pick one before you start, or change mid-activity. Change it mid-ruck and the surface you finish on is the one recorded.
When you slow below walking pace or the GPS goes flaky, RuckTrack falls back to the watch's heart-rate-based estimate so calories don't stall on breaks or steep descents. The total is a hybrid of both.
See the calorie math explainer for the equation, the Santee descent correction, and the hybrid fallback logic.
Indoors, GPS is no help and Garmin's HR-only profiles ignore your pack. Two recording modes, picked at the start:
In both indoor modes GPS is disabled and elevation stats are hidden. Treadmill Auto also hides the Effort page; Manual keeps that slot as a Pace page. You choose how the session lands in Garmin Connect with the Saves as setting: Walk, the default, records an Indoor Walk and keeps your watch's native pedometer distance, while Ruck records it as a proper Ruck, which reads better in your activity list but relies on a foot pod for distance since there's no GPS indoors. Your current choice shows on the start screen, and either way the pack-aware fields write the same as outdoor sessions.
Pack weight, terrain, incline, and belt speed can all change during a session without pausing the timer. Long-press UP on any live screen to open the Settings menu, pick the value, confirm. The Pandolf model picks up the new values on the next 1-second tick. Past calorie integration is not retroactively recomputed.
On touch-only watches without a reliable long-press, hit the Action button to pause and pick Settings from the pause menu. The pause menu also has a Lap option for touch-only devices.
Auto Lap fires a lap marker every 1 mile (or 1 km, based on your distance unit). Each lap triggers a short haptic and a 3-second lap-summary view showing the lap's distance, time, and pace, then returns to the live screen. Manual laps fire the same haptic and summary on the Back button.
If you record a manual lap before the next auto-lap marker, the auto-lap counter advances one full unit from that point. You don't get a double-lap at the next mile mark.
Auto Lap is on by default. Toggle it in Settings, before or during an activity.
The recording can pause itself when you stop and resume when you move again, so a wait at a crosswalk or a light doesn't drag down your pace and moving time.
Off by default. Rucking usually means counting your total time under load, rest stops included, so RuckTrack won't change how your time is recorded unless you ask it to. Turn it on in Settings, before a ruck or during one. Outdoor only: it reads GPS speed to know you've stopped, so the toggle doesn't appear in treadmill modes.
It is slow to pause and quick to resume. Pausing waits until you are properly stopped for a few seconds, not just grinding slowly up a hill. Resuming takes one clear step. Your walking cadence counts as movement too, so if GPS drops out in a tunnel or under heavy tree cover, you won't come back to find yourself paused for the last two miles. An AUTO PAUSED banner shows on screen whenever it has paused you, and START always takes back manual control.
Short tones fire at start, pause, resume, save, and discard. Same audio rhythm as Garmin's built-in activity profiles, so starting and saving a ruck sounds like starting and saving anything else on the watch. Silent on watches without a speaker.
A seven-page summary opens automatically after you save. Swipe or use UP/DOWN to move through it:
Press the Action button on any summary page for a short menu: Calorie Details, Stats, and About. Calorie Details is a scrolling list of every input that fed the math: total burn, calories without pack, pack bonus in kcal and percent, your watch's native estimate, plus pack weight, terrain, body weight, and the speed and grade ranges used. Stats is the lifetime dashboard described below.
Outdoor sessions classify as Rucking (Garmin's own FIT subsport 124) on watches running Connect IQ 5.1 or later. Watches on older firmware, including the Connect IQ 5.0 models and the Connect IQ 3.4 tier (the fēnix 6 Pro family), can't record that subsport, so those sessions arrive as Hiking instead; the name and every load-aware field are identical either way. Activity names auto-populate as "Ruck 35 lb" or "Treadmill Ruck 16 kg" so the activity list reads at a glance — no manual rename.
The activity's Stats → Connect IQ section shows ten load-aware fields:
Per-second grade and metabolic rate write into the FIT file, so Garmin Connect charts them second by second alongside the native pace, heart-rate, and elevation graphs.
Scroll to RuckTrack in your watch's widget loop to see your last saved session: distance, duration, pack weight, and calories. One-glance check; no need to open the app.
The Connect IQ 3.4 watches are the exception: the fēnix 6 Pro, 6S Pro and 6X Pro family. Their firmware has no glance support for activity apps, so there is no RuckTrack glance to scroll to. Nothing else differs on those watches.
From the start-screen Settings menu, pick History to see your last 30 saved rucks: date, distance, duration, pack weight, and calories per card. Newest first. Read-only; for editing or deleting an activity, use Garmin Connect.
Open Settings → Stats (or pick Stats from the post-save action menu) for a scrolling dashboard of everything you've saved on this watch: lifetime distance, time, calories, and tonnage, your weekly streak, and your best pace at three pack-weight tiers.
Updating from an older version? The streak and best paces are reconstructed from your History list at first launch, so the screen doesn't start from zero. Like History and the lifetime totals, Stats lives on the watch itself; see the FAQ for what moves to a new device.
After an update, a small green dot appears beside the Settings affordance on the start screen. It means the version you just picked up added something. Open Settings and What's New sits near the top, a short page describing what changed and where to find it. Opening the page is what clears the dot, so it stops once you've read it and never clears itself behind your back. A fresh install starts with no dot, since there's nothing to catch up on.
These watches give an app roughly 128 KB to work with, a fraction of what the rest of the fleet allows, so a few screens are left out to keep recording solid: lifetime Stats, History, Calorie Details, the What's New page, and the Settings entries for Pages and the Overview grid. Everything that records a ruck behaves as it does elsewhere, including all seven live pages, calories, laps, Auto Pause and the full post-save summary. The Overview page is present with its standard layout rather than a configurable one, treadmill Manual shows the usual Effort page in place of the Pace screen, and saved history holds 10 rucks instead of 30. The devices page has the full breakdown.
Every setting, preset, and history entry stays on your watch. Meridian operates no servers, runs no analytics, has no companion phone app, and uses no third-party SDKs. The full privacy policy covers what gets stored locally and how Garmin Connect handles the FIT file.