RuckTrack is a Connect IQ Device App built specifically for rucking, weighted-vest walking, loaded hiking, and treadmill incline-walks. Everything below is shipping in the current store build.
The start screen shows your pack weight, GPS quality, time, battery, and heart rate. Hit START and you're recording. No menu trees, no GPS-lock gate.
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, down to the pixel: a custom number typeface, color-coded zone arcs, a pulsing heart, faded dividers, nothing stock. It's the most polished watch experience of any rucking app on Connect IQ. On round watches, the v2.6 redesign curves page titles and footers onto the bezel and dims the heart-rate ring to spotlight the zone you're in, for a cleaner, more native look. Swipe or use UP/DOWN to move between pages.
Treadmill modes drop the Effort page because vertical speed and elevation aren't meaningful indoors. Six pages in treadmill, seven outdoors.
This is the wedge. 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. The terrain at save time is what writes to the FIT file.
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.
Treadmill mode handles the case where GPS won't help you and Garmin's HR-only profiles ignore your pack. Two indoor recording modes, picked at the start:
In both indoor modes, GPS is disabled and the Effort page is hidden. Sessions save as Indoor Walk in Garmin Connect (Garmin's only indoor-walk subsport), and the pack-aware fields write the same way 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.
Short tones fire at start, pause, resume, save, and discard. Same audio rhythm as Garmin's built-in activity profiles, so the app feels native to the recording flow you already know. 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 FIT subsport 124, fleet-wide). 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 seven load-aware fields:
Per-second grade and metabolic rate write to the FIT record stream, so Garmin Connect renders them as time-series charts on the activity detail page 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.
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.
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.