Show Course on Map

TobiasLj said:

Since most of my trail courses are drawn free without any road, trails or paths on the map I don't expect to get turn notifications every time there is an intersection in reality or the trail do a sharp turn. Still it is a fantastic feature to plan a run or bike ride in advance for an unknown area and just hit the woods. 

Right, following a course with a map still works, for the most part. Still I find it unreliable as it loses the course multiple times on any given trail run while I remain perfectly on the course (the watch map showing me right on top of the course). It re-joins the course again but still that is quite annoying. For example, why does it always lose course when I stop to tie shoe laces?

But here's my main problem with it - in order to follow a course reliably when running on trails in an unfamiliar area I have to pretty much stay on the map screen 100% of time. Turn notifications are completely broken as they just fire every minute for every sharp bend of a course, so I had to turn them off after my first trail run. Without notifications I can't really use other data screens for a prolonged time and have to always return to the map.

Furthermore, the map just doesn't have enough contrast to see it reliably at running pace. Trails and forest roads look as very narrow 1 pixel lines regardless of the zoom level, and if the lighting conditions are not bright enough, I simply can't see any elements of the map except the course itself, which is rendered as a thick bright line. But then, I would say, my experience navigating with Fenix is not any better than an experience doing breadcrumbs navigation with any other watch (e.g. Suunto watches I used before). I still regularly miss turns despite having the map and supposedly advanced navigation features. Furthermore, on Fenix the "current" position on the map screen is often lagging behind by as much as 10 seconds, which, I find, makes me more likely to run past a turn.

Furthermore, not only Garmin injects useless turn-by-turn waypoints into the course that don't really work, but it also overwrites any user waypoints that could already be on the course. At least with other watches (e.g. Suunto) I often used my own waypoints as navigation hints or custom directions. I know I can do the same with Fenix as well, but that requires me jumping through the hoops to make that work - create a course as a FIT file in plotaroute.com and manually copy it to the watch via a computer. Overall, I'd say the experience is far from perfect. Garmin could improve navigation experience substantially for advanced users like me by doing just a few small tweaks like improving the map contrast for running activities and properly supporting user waypoints, and allowing user to skip/disable useless pre-generated turn-by-turn directions.

Furthermore, Garmin navigation doesn't help when the course crosses itself or has an out-and back section or in any other cases when there are multiple possible course paths on the map. There is no arrow to guide you into the specific path. This is definitely less common but I have run into difficulties like that multiple times when trying to follow an existing race course exactly the way it was planned. Similarly, if I go off course for whatever reason and then rejoin it some time later, there is no arrow to tell me which of the two possible directions to go. I find that I have to stop and zoom out far enough to understand which way to go.