Garmin Timing Gates – Chicago Marathon Adds Support

One of Garmin’s new features is the oddly named ‘auto lap by timing gates’.

When you run longer events, especially crowded ones, you will inevitably run further than the precise race distance. Sometimes, there’s not too much you can do about that, but it causes a problem that you might not know how much of the race there is to go, also messing up your stats.

Bigger races will have official mile or kilometre markers, so wouldn’t it be good if you could align your watch’s laps with those markers?  You can, of course, manually create a lap as you pass the markers; however, with the new Autolap by Timing Gates, you guessed it!, that happens automatically. The only condition is that you must be following an official (digital) course with the markers placed on it. When you’ve finished the race, you will be shown the times for the race laps (you may have run distances like 1.01, 1.02, and 1.03 miles). Your pace shown will thus be the pace per race lap mile, not the pace per physical mile you were running (which will never be slower).

Watches supported: Forerunner 970, Fenix 8, Enduro 3, and Tactix 8.

The news, kindly shared here by @miknik, is that the world’s premier marathon event, the Chicago Marathon, has added support, as shown in the image above. Specifically, as per the comments below, it is likely that the race organisers manually confirm the accuracy of each mile marker’s GPS location when the course is created, which Garmin then routinely picks up, in this case, through Ahotu (Garmin has been partnered with them since 2023).

Take Out

Probably a niche but useful feature for those who want tidy race stats.

This is the first of several stages of additional features that rely on the timing gates, as discussed in the following link. It gets pretty interesting!…

Garmin Timing Gates – another new feature for June/July 2025