Peakreel

How to see your Garmin year in review for free

Garmin ·

In December 2025 Garmin launched its year in review, the Garmin Connect Rundown: total steps, average sleep score, totals for each activity type and more. Only Connect+ subscribers can open it. Connect+ costs $6.99 a month or $69.99 a year in the US, with a 30-day free trial. Many people who had worn a Garmin every day for years found out they had to pay to see their own year.

Your year still lives in your Garmin account, and you can get to it for free. Here are three ways, from quickest to most complete, and a fourth if you want the story rather than the table.

The short answer:

  1. Start the Connect+ free trial after the Rundown comes out, and cancel before it renews.
  2. Open Garmin Connect on the web and use Reports → Progress Summary, grouped by year.
  3. Export all your data from your Garmin account and add it up yourself in a spreadsheet.
  4. See what a year story looks like in the Peakreel demo.

Is the Garmin year in review free this year?

As of mid-November 2026, Garmin hasn’t said. Last year the Rundown arrived on 3 December and only Connect+ members could open it. Garmin’s own press release in January 2026 still listed it as a Connect+ feature, and we found no news since then that it has become free. So plan for it to need Connect+ again. If Garmin changes its mind, the Rundown will show up in the Garmin Connect app and you won’t need any of the steps below.

What my year looks like in a table

I wear a fēnix 7, and before that a Forerunner and a fēnix 5. Here is what a table makes of the two things I remember most.

A marathon is one row: 42.2 km, 3:19:21. The table doesn’t know that every training run before it was a Garmin workout my coach set, that Garmin’s race time prediction said 3:19, that I aimed for 3:15, or that I slowed at a water station at km 37 and still finished with a personal best.

A summit of about 5,900 m is one hike with a big climbing number. The table doesn’t show that for the last two days before it my Body Battery sat at 5, the lowest it shows, as a flat line. Six months later, the highest mountain in the Alps is another row.

Totals are where you start. The story is in the shape of the year around them, so this guide covers both: how to get the numbers for free, then what to look for in them.

1. Use the Connect+ free trial

This is the fastest way to see Garmin’s own recap. Start the 30-day trial after the Rundown is released, not before, so the trial covers it. Then set a reminder to cancel a few days before it renews.

Check the trial terms in the app first. They can differ by country and change over time, and you may not get a second full trial if you used one before. In January 2026 Garmin offered a 14-day trial to people who had already tried Connect+, for a limited time, so check whether something similar is on when you look.

2. Progress Summary on the Garmin Connect website

This works on the website (connect.garmin.com), and it’s free.

  1. Sign in to Garmin Connect in a browser.
  2. Open Reports, then choose Progress Summary at the bottom of the menu.
  3. Pick the period, for example the previous year.
  4. Group by Year for one row per year, or by activity type.
  5. Choose All Activities for the headline numbers, or a single sport, such as running or cycling, for a full table.
  6. Use Customize to pick the columns, and Export to CSV if you want the numbers in a spreadsheet.

For steps, Reports → Health and Fitness shows daily, 7-day, 4-week and 1-year totals, and the arrows take you back through past years. The same menu has sleep, stress, resting heart rate and intensity minutes.

Garmin moves these menus around between redesigns, so the names may differ slightly on your screen. Check the dates at the top of each report too: some show the last 12 months rather than a calendar year.

3. Export everything and add it up yourself

This is the most complete free option. The file takes a while to arrive, but once you have it, the totals take about 10 minutes.

Request the export now

Sign in to your Garmin account, open Data management, and choose Export your data. Garmin emails a download link when the archive is ready. It doesn’t promise how long that takes, and it can be days. If you want your numbers before the holidays, ask for it today.

Find your activities in the ZIP

Unzip the archive. Your activities are in a folder called DI_CONNECT, then DI-Connect-Fitness, in a file whose name ends in summarizedActivities.json. It has one entry per activity: when it started, the sport, distance, time, climbing, heart rate and more. The raw .fit files sit separately in more ZIP files under DI_CONNECT, and you don’t need them for yearly totals.

Garmin doesn’t document this archive, and folder and file names have changed between exports. If your copy looks different, search the unzipped folder for “summarizedActivities”.

Get it into a spreadsheet

  • Excel: use Data → Get Data → From File → From JSON, pick the file, and expand the list in the Power Query window until each activity is a row. Then choose Close & Load. This option is most reliable in Excel for Windows.
  • Google Sheets can’t open JSON directly. The simplest free route is the Export CSV button at the top right of the Activities list on connect.garmin.com. It only exports the rows on screen, so scroll down until the whole year has loaded first. That CSV already shows kilometres or miles and readable times, so you can skip the unit step below.

Avoid uploading the file to a random online converter. It’s a full history of where and when you trained.

Watch the units

The export doesn’t store numbers the way the app shows them. People who have checked entries against the original .fit files found that distance and climbing are in centimetres and times are in milliseconds. Start times are counted in milliseconds since 1 January 1970. Before you trust a total, find one activity you know, such as a 10 km run, and check the conversion.

Add helper columns and totals

Say column A is beginTimestamp, B is activityType, C is distance, D is duration and E is elevationGain. Add these in row 2 and fill them down:

  • F, date. Google Sheets: =EPOCHTODATE(A2, 2). Excel: =A2/86400000+DATE(1970,1,1), formatted as a date. Both give UTC time, so a late-night activity on 31 December may land in the next year.
  • G, year: =YEAR(F2)
  • H, kilometres: =C2/100000
  • I, hours: =D2/3600000
  • J, metres climbed: =E2/100
  • K, month: =TEXT(F2, "yyyy-mm")
  • L, week starting Monday: =INT(F2)-WEEKDAY(F2, 2)+1, formatted as a date

Then the year in a few cells, here for 2026:

  • Activities: =COUNTIF(G:G, 2026)
  • Distance: =SUMIFS(H:H, G:G, 2026)
  • Hours: =SUMIFS(I:I, G:G, 2026)
  • Climbing: =SUMIFS(J:J, G:G, 2026)
  • Running only: =SUMIFS(H:H, G:G, 2026, B:B, "*running*"), which also catches trail and treadmill runs
  • Longest activity: =MAXIFS(H:H, G:G, 2026)

For the rest, insert a pivot table: filter on year, put month (K) or week (L) in rows and the sum of hours (I) in values. Put sport (B) in rows instead to get hours per sport. Sort by the value and your busiest month and biggest week are at the top.

What to look for in your year

Once you have weeks and months in rows, these questions say more than the grand total:

  1. How many weeks had any training at all? Count the weeks in the pivot with hours above zero.
  2. What was your longest run of weeks in a row? Look for the longest stretch with no empty week.
  3. Which month was busiest, and which was steadiest? They’re often not the same month.
  4. What was your biggest week, and what came after it? A big week followed by a quiet one is normal. Several quiet ones in a row may be worth a look.
  5. Where were your rest weeks? Were they planned, or did illness, travel or work decide them?
  6. What did the weeks before your main event look like? Did hours drop before race day or a big trip, or stay high to the end?
  7. How many hours went to each sport? Hours count a swim, a hike and a gym session the same way, which distance can’t.
  8. What did it add up to? Distance as a share of the way around the Earth (about 40,075 km), climbing counted in Everests (8,849 m each), the highest point reached.

The useful comparison is with your own usual, not with other people. If something in your numbers worries you, such as a long run of weeks when you felt unwell, talk to a doctor rather than reading more into a spreadsheet.

4. See your year as a story

That’s what Peakreel’s Your year does. It turns a year of watch data into a short story, one fact per screen: distance, hours, runs of weeks in a row, the steadiest month, the highest summit and personal bests.

You can try it on a real year of data from my own watch, or open the full demo dashboard.

To be clear about where things stand: today the story runs on demo data only. Connecting your own Garmin account needs approval from Garmin’s developer program first. Until then, options 1 to 3 work for anyone.

Common questions

Is the Garmin year in review free? Last year the Garmin Connect Rundown needed a Connect+ subscription. Garmin hasn’t announced this year’s terms yet.

When does the Garmin Connect Rundown come out? Last year it appeared on 3 December 2025. Garmin hasn’t given a date for this year, so early December is the best guess.

Where do I find the Garmin Connect Rundown? In the Garmin Connect app, once Garmin releases it, if you have Connect+.

Does the Rundown include sleep and HRV? Last year’s Rundown included your average sleep score, and reviewers also describe Body Battery and Fitness Age in it. We found no report that it covered HRV. For free, Reports → Health and Fitness on the website shows sleep, stress and resting heart rate by year.

Can I see past years? With Progress Summary, yes: pick a longer period and group by year to get one row per year. The data export also covers your whole history. Garmin hasn’t said whether a past year’s Rundown stays available.

Does Progress Summary work on the phone? It’s a report on the Garmin Connect website, not a screen in the app. You can open the website in your phone’s browser, but the wide tables are much easier on a computer.

Can I see my yearly totals without paying? Yes. On the Garmin Connect website, Reports → Progress Summary groups your totals by year, and you can export all your data from your Garmin account at any time.

Why are the numbers in my export so big? Distance and climbing are stored in centimetres and times in milliseconds. Divide distance by 100,000 for kilometres, climbing by 100 for metres, and time by 3,600,000 for hours.

Sources

Garmin, Garmin Connect and Connect+ are trademarks of Garmin Ltd. or its subsidiaries. Peakreel is not affiliated with Garmin.