Garmin Forerunner 45

GPS really drains the battery. But battery life is much longer otherwise. If you’re ever away and forget your charger chord, just use the stopwatch function and you might be good for a week, starting from a full charge.

Saying you need to charge your watch after 3-4 runs doesn't really mean anything. Are your runs 20min 5k's or are you running 4x 3hr long runs? Specs say this watch gets "up to" 7 days in smartwatch mode and "up to" 13 hours in GPS mode. In my experience, Garmin's estimates are WAY optimistic (unlike Apple who are the ONE electronics mfg who are honest in their battery estimates). If Garmin says 7 day in watch mode, you're probably looking at 4-5 days max assuming ZERO GPS usage. Expect this value to fluctuate depending on how far away your watch is from your phone. If you turn off your phone at night or deactivate Bluetooth due to airplane mode, then your watch will burn extra battery constantly searching for your phone's Bluetooth. If you've configured your watch's backlight to Always On or Raise-to-Wake, then that also burns battery which Garmin's estimates don't account for. Also, 13hr est. for GPS is way optimistic. Expect to burn around 10-12% battery per hr of GPS activity in actual usage. In challenging condition, battery drain will be even higher.

Regarding your Q... is GPS still on when you "exit out" of runs and go to the main screen. It depends. "Exit out" has several colloquial meanings that don't correspond to actual Garmin button press functions so I don't know what you actually mean.

When you intentionally start a GPS activity, the watch REMAINS in active gps mode until you INTENTIONALLY END that gps activity by pressing the START/STOP BUTTON (upper right button) AND THEN cycle thru the START/STOP MENU options and intentionally select one of the options: Resume, Save, Resume Later, Discard. You MUST select one of these options in order to END a gps activity and deactivate the gps receiver.

If you intentionally start a GPS activity and then simply cycle through the screens until you see the date/time screen (without first ending the activity), then the GPS receiver is STILL RUNNING and burning battery.

Thanks Garmin It Depends - my 3-4 runs are typically 45-55 min. Yes, I am discarding my runs after each run. I do not have it synched with my iPhone - no clue how to do that and I would not be interested as I just record my runs on my laptop on a MS Word program - no strava - thanks for the detailed answer - sounds like I just need to charge it 1X a week and I will be good

Also, if you want to significantly increase your watch's standby time, go into your Settings and turn off the Always-on, wrist-based, HR monitor. There should be an option to ONLY activate the hrm DURING an activity. By switching off always-on HRM you'll lose the ability to use GarminPay as well as a ton of Garmin's "health & wellness" metrics (sleep tracking, stress monitoring, Body Battery, resting HR, afib detection, fitness age, respiration rate, etc...). But you indicated you aren't interested in anything beyond Pace, Time & Distance during runs so it shouldn't be much of a features trade-off in order to bump battery runtime.

Bet some big coin on the Chiefs winning in the Super Bowl - and buy yourself a better GPS watch with better battery life.

Ok... 1st things 1st... even though you're not syncing your watch to your phone, I bet your watch's Bluetooth transceiver is still actively searching every second of the day...

Press and HOLD the upper-Left button until the circular Settings menu appears. Do you see a blinking icon of phone receiver + Bluetooth symbol? If you do and it's blinking, that means your watch is actively searching the bluetooth spectrum for a phone... meaning it's burning extra power. To stop this, cycle through the menu items until you see the airplane icon and click it. That activates Airplane mode and turns off the Bluetooth transceiver - saving power.

But I'd HIGHLY recommend you go to the App Store and download Garmin Connect app. Install it.... it'll walk you though the entire process for creating a Garmin Connect account and then will guide you step-by-step how to sync your watch to your iPhone. Your FR45 will be WAY MORE USEFUL and insightful once connected to your iPhone. No need for Strava unless you crave Socials & "sharing".