Yes, they will detect upcoming climbs without a route. The elevation graph, however, will not reflect the upcoming elevation even if a climb isn’t detected. On Wahoo it does.
Courtesy of @gpl he talks about it here and shows it: https://youtu.be/-JcV_EPZRbU?si=Hf3tz-ISZNQtjlxE&t=98
what exactly is unclear?
you can clearly see what gp lama mentioned earlier on your 2 screenshots. garmin is lightyears ahead of the competition in maps and map detail. what you call “unclear” is detail.
We were discussing the fact that according to @kevistraining (and I have read the same thing multiple times) you cannot import data from non-Garmin head units to Garmin. If you buy a Garmin sports watch and own e. g. a Hammerhead head unit your data is I’m at least two silos.
And I added to that there is no Switzerland for your data anymore.
I honestly don’t know whether/how they do it. Both companies currently don’t offer sports watches (I don’t count the Rival as Wahoo has abandoned development and is simply selling off what they have in stock).
Like I wrote, Garmin Connect is a form of lock-in. Great if you love Garmin devices, more power to you, but less great for the entire sports ecosystem in the long run.
What do you do in 10–20 years when you switch to another company or Garmin shuts down its services? Or by that time Coros (to name a random company) has become the Garmin of the future, the undisputed leader in the cycling gadget and sports watch universe. (This obviously applies to any other service.) I don’t have any backup of my training history except for what I have stored in Strava and TR. I also have a partial record in TP, Apple Health and Wahoo. All are siloed.
To add to that: there are some edge cases in mapping where Garmin was/is quite a bit behind. Up to and including the x40-series of devices you had separate Japanese versions and you could not display Japanese characters on non-Japanese devices. Downloading international maps was also a pain, you had to e. g. sideload Open Map maps. Garmin has remedied this with the 1050 and, presumably, other, future x50-series devices.
Wahoo head units have never had that problem.
(This is really a case of Windows = Garmin vs. mac OS = Wahoo, because with the former you also had the same issues while the latter has always been Unicode compatible.) This may only affect a small community, but for those of use who (used to) live in e. g. Japan or China, this matters.
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I’d consider the Garmin screenshot to be less clear for in-ride routing than the HH or a normal Wahoo map. The route is a slightly wider line but similar color to the crossing roads, the hazard is marked with an arrow that looks a lot like the rider. It has more detail as a map but is harder to parse at a glance.
However, I think Garmin provides many more options than others in terms of overlays, no? Wahoo and HH give you a map, take it or leave it. I believe at least the latest Garmins give you options for map colors, level of detail, topo etc. I think this fits the general pattern of Wahoo/HH doing things pretty well out of the box, Garmin seeming a bit overwhelming but allowing more complete customization.
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This is a fair point. HH’s implementation of elevation data is fairly poor in my view; no way to see elevation of the whole route or “to go”, you only get a pre-set “next couple miles” graph and even that lacks any indication of gradient. The Wahoo zoom in/out function is super handy for elevation.
Ahh, OK. Got it. I think we absolutely need a Switzerland of data (I like that!), but I think you’re right that we’re not going to get it from Garmin. Strava has historically done a good job of serving that purpose but obviously we can’t rely on the anymore.
I do think it’ll have to be a third party that does it, though, because device makers not only don’t have many good incentives to do it but have quite a few very real reasons not to. Device lock-in being the biggest, obviously. Even if there was a service ready to deliver your Garmin history to your Wahoo or Hammerhead account, would they have any interest in pulling it in?
All that said, it’s definitely a vacuum that needs to be filled. TrainingPeaks is maybe the best candidate right now and with their expansion into the virtual training space they might be thinking about broadening their base and core market? Intervals.icu is super well-positioned, but I’m not sure a single developer would be able to handle the exponential increase in traffic volume and data storage. Anyone else out there I’m missing?
Hitting the right combination of cost and ease of integration is one, but figuring out what it would actually do with your data is a whole other question, from a product perspective. Is it going to provide some kind of unique data analytics? Is it just a passthrough hub? The reason Strava worked so well as a data hub is that it offers a lot more besides being a data hub.
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I think Intervals.icu is already seeing an increase, and seems to be handling it fine.
For Wahoo at this point in time they are open, and publish the documentation to allow pushing completed activities into their ecosystem.
Don’t want to get too far from the discussion on the Wahoo Ace, but Dropbox and RunGap are possible “Switzerlands” if you’re looking for solutions to check out. Of course they could also go belly up. I really like RunGap, but even though they integrate with tons of apps, including Wahoo, GC, Coros, and Hammerhead, Zwift, TrainerDay, Xert, Apple Health, TrainingPeaks, and Intervals.icu, they do not have TR on their list.
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The key question: what’s the business model for this “Switzerland of fitness data”? I’m skeptical there is one. Anything you charge will be met with harsh resistance from the majority of potential users. And most free services in this space get around 2% conversion from free to paid subscribers.
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Yeah it seems like the desired features are 1) Free, 2) Not tied to any well-established profitable company, and 3) Will definitely be around forever and not disappear when its business model proves impossible. Good luck!
Personally I have no problem with Strava, Garmin and/or TR being a repository for most of my historical data. It’s mostly useless anyway, though I occasionally like to look back at old routes or stare wistfully at power curves from races when I was younger and fitter…
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Calling Garmin a lock-in because most users upload to connect is hilarious. Connect the device to your computer and transfer the files off. Upload them wherever you want! Store them in an album to show your children. Garmin Connect is a nice to have but there was a time before it.
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I think I could make arguments in favor of that, but I know this isn’t going to happen:
- Garmin has done a wonderful job setting and sharing standards (Ant+ and the .fit file format come to mind). That means they are in charge of relevant standards and their standards are being used. If that carries over to other areas, then “they are in charge”.
- Garmin benefits from accumulating as much data as possible in the long run, i. e. you want anyone with a Garmin device of any sort to use Garmin’s cloud to store data. (Which, then, Garmin can use for Machine Learning/AI training, etc.). Like someone wrote in response to me, where is Wahoo’s radar? There is so much stuff that Garmin makes, but which does not have many competitors.
Good question. I have had a TP account (I technically still do), but their platform seems very old and creaky. I’m glad to see them taking steps to modernize it. There is a bunch of other platforms (like intervals.icu) that could also serve this role. The issue is to get people paying for it, a chicken-and-egg problem.
Yes, I think you are asking the right question: what service can you offer in addition to storage? With Strava it was social (even though they never cracked the code of becoming a social network … so many missed opportunities here), with something like TP or intervals.icu it is/could be analytics.
This is also a gap that TR has: its analytics features are somewhere between poor/few to non-existent. And TR hasn’t made any moves, so if you want to track some additional metrics, you need to use another platform.
Practically speaking, the best we can do right now is to keep multiple copies in multiple silos so that even if one silo goes bad (cough, Strava, cough), we still have others to fall back on.
I don’t know about RunGap, never heard of it, but I wouldn’t call Dropbox a solution. You can certainly get copies of the fit files, but you lose the database on top of that. Still, better than nothing.
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iOS-only, so no bueno.
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Ahh. Good catch. I didn’t realize that.
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Annoyingly there still are a lot of services/devices that only sync to their own server and/or steava
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That feels like an issue for those services / devices to solve, or they will whither.
Oddly, FasCat has completely disconnected from TP. You can do the download/upload thing, but it was a strange decision, imo.
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My understanding is that they wanted to have customers switch to their own ML/AI backend. This gives them complete control of the data and allow them to use it for training and analysis.
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