I changed to Wahoo a few years ago from a Garmin 1040 and was bowled over with the simplicity. As someone who builds tech for a living, I attach a huge amount of value to things that just work with minimal to zero friction.
However, as time as gone on, two quite important things to me have been frustrating me with my new Roam 3;
Live segments ahead/behind seems to be based on average speed;
I like benchmarking myself on long (25-60 mins) climbs and a part of that is Strava live segments and seeing my realtime performance vs my previous pr.
I noticed the other day where I found myself 45 seconds up for 3/4 of a climb, but because it’s average speed it plummeted in the last, steeper 1/4. I don’t think my Garmin worked like that.
Workout player
I do structured workouts outdoors, I think the wahoo one is ok - I can see target powers, what’s coming up etc but there’s no way to pause it (say you’re 30 seconds away from a more suitable stretch of road for the next interval) while still seei my data fields (it shows workout overview while paused) and I think the target power range is too digital - the Garmin one was much more fluid and useful.
My default thought is to try a 1050 - I know I liked these things about my 1040. Don’t love the huge form factor, will miss page zoom and can only hope they’ve fixed the workout and activity sync that frustrated me on the 1040.
Holding out and hoping a 850 drops could be a viable option here I suppose.
Karoo 3 seems interesting, but I’m put off by reviews of the workout player being a bit poor. I think I’d also be frustrated by the reportedly laggy ui
Anything else I should consider or other relevant thoughts?
Where the Roam 3 was showing me pulling ahead (up to 45 seconds) for the first, lower gradient portion, Strava shows me behind the entire way. In fact, Strava shows almost the opposite where I make up time on the steeper sections.
There was a more compelling example where I was on a climb with a 400m flat in the middle - I was 45 seconds down before it and level after, despite doing more w/kg than previous efforts. Strava shows I was actually ahead before the flat, I lost a little at the start before maintaining the gap.
It is 100% based on average speed.
What’s interesting is, I didn’t think my Bolt v2 had a problem either. It seems such a weird place to regress though
Ha, that’s interesting! Thanks for the update. Well, I did hear that their v3 head units (Ace included) have a brand-new firmware, rewritten from scratch. And your findings suggest that they messed up the live segment functionality big time. Well, not that I’m surprised, but quite disappointed.
I use an Edge 840 and the workout player is terrible. There are a number of posts to that effect on the Garmin Edge 840 forum. You might try to build your own screen using data fields, but some of them don’t work properly. There probably are better IQ workout players but I don’t have any recommendations in that regard.
I don’t mind the 840 workout player at all, except everytime I have to replace the Step Distance data field with Elapsed Time, but that’s super easy. Just wish it would save that way.
I think that Garmin also uses average speed, but I guess I don’t have any direct proof. I’m thinking particularly of singletrack MTB sections where I lose considerable ground to my own comparable efforts during slower technical or climbing bits but will make up ground fast as soon as we start descending.
It also seems like that’s likely the case because Garmin has been hyping their “enduro” timing mode on the new Edge MTB which gives you gate times throughout a run and lets you know whether you are net up or down on a previous combined effort.
Having the live segment’s ahead/behind feature not just based on average speed would require the device to have the full dataset of your PR effort, the efforts of people around you on the leaderboard, and the KoM holder (all depends on settings) available, for every segment you’ve got that feature activated for. Plausible, but feels unlikely to me.
Unless you can tell me otherwise, I’m pretty sure my personal support tickets aren’t viewable by others.
Happy to commit to updating this thread when I get updates though. I’ve asked for further info about eta and whether it affects v2 and earlier devices