Here is a glaring bug that probably many ultrarunners have run into. I have experienced this bug with officially provided GPX race courses in all 4 of my last large races.
The repro steps are very simple and straightforward:
1) Race officials provide an official GPX file for the race course which has waypoints for all aid stations. That is super convenient because that is supposed to work with the Up Ahead feature and provide really helpful guidance during the race. It is great to know how far each aid station is. Right? Garmin doesn't seem to think so.
2) Import the GPX file into Garmin Connect. So far it looks good - Garmin Connect seems to have imported course points for all aid stations correctly and they all show up on the map in Garmin Connect in the right places and with the right names.
3) Save the imported course in Garmin Connect and sync it to the watch.
4) At the beginning of the race, load the course to the watch. Initially aid stations do show on the Up Ahead screen, but not in the right order and distances to them are not shown.
5) Once the race starts and the watch locks on course, all aid stations disappear from Up Ahead screen forever and the only point that remains in Up Ahead is the end of the course. That is super frustrating. The very useful feature simply doesn't work!
What happens here:
It seems that the implementation of Up Ahead on Fenix 7 expects every course point to have distance on course. If you add a course point manually in Garmin Connect course editor, that adds distance to that course point. However if you import a course from an external GPX file with waypoints, even though the import recognizes those waypoint and does convert them to course points, and shows them on the map, their distance isn't set and remains zero. Therefore, as far as Fenix 7 is concerned all of those course points end up being right at the start of the course. That why they all disappear as soon as the watch locks on course.
This is easy to verify by loading the course into any FIT file viewer - it does show course points but with their distances set to zero.
Workaround:
Now that I am familiar with this issue I do the following to make course points for aid station work correctly with Up Ahead - I zoom to each imported course point on the map, then I delete it and create another course point in the same place with the same name. That requires a little bit of work, but at least I know where to create them. Once that is done, all course points work correctly with the Up Ahead feature.
Also, sometimes I need to create two course points at the same location but at different distances. That is necessary when the race course goes over the same aid station twice, which is actually very common. I had that in all 4 of my last races. It is a bit difficult to create those course points correctly with Garmin Connect so that they are at a nearly the same location but at different distances, but if you zoom all the way in that is possible.
What Garmin should do if it cares about Up Ahead actually working for many users who use officially provided GPX files:
Solution 1: Calculate distance on course to every imported course point and save in the course point. That is not that different from when a course point is added manually. Also it would be nice for Garmin Connect to recognize that the course may go multiple times through some course points, so those has to be duplicated at different distances. This solution requires only changes in Garmin Connect, so it will automatically fix this issue in all models of Garmin watches that have Up Ahead feature.
Solution 2: Do the fix on the watch side. When the course is loaded, do a pass through the course, match all course points, and update their distance. Just like in the solution 1 it would be great to recognize that the course may go through some course points multiple times at different distances.
