I spent a good 2-3hrs to figure out what was happening. Did a test run. And IT WORKS. But I figured out what and why things were happening.
I need to post the exact findings but here’s what I think is happening.
- Garmin/Strava embeds the starred segments in the Strava Route
- This is a STATIC data point
- In the Connect App - you must confirm in the courses section that these segment “flags” are visible. It’s represented as “Start” and “End”
- If there’s just an “End” without a corresponding “Start” Flag, it will behave strangely. This could explain the random behavior I saw when the segment name will appear during the end of the segment only.
- Not tested but overlapping segments may cause this or other issues
Now for why the inconsistency.
- When the Strava Route is auto synced, the SEGMENTS MUST be pre-selected. Any new segments will sync to Garmin’s “GENERAL” segment section but IT WILL NOT update the Strava route already synced previously with the newly starred segment. Hence the STATIC nature of the course/route.
- How do you address this? Any new starred segments added after the Strava Route/Course is created and synced MUST BE UNSTARRED and RESTARRED. But careful with timing. This forces a resync.
- This can be simply verified on the Connect App Courses section by looking for the new starred segment ON THAT SPECIFIC COURSE.
- NOTE: You must DELETE the old Strava Course from your GARMIN DEVICE each time an update is made on the course OR segment. This way when the device is SYNCed the new updates are now part of the new map.
I need to fully test this part but the static nature seems to coincide.
This is why the results are so sporadic and for me the timing and updates was off or conflicting with pre-existing courses that I thought the updates were dynamic on the routes on my device.
- Wahoo seems to treat segments as a separate service and does not require the segments flags embedded in the route.
- Garmin does the same as Wahoo ONLY for non-course riding.
This is the reason I think why GARMIN says it doesn’t support Strava Live Segments when on a course.
But after they figured that it could work if they embed the segment flags on the route itself.
My guess is why the conflicting info support VS unsupported.
Sorry long post but here’s the steps:
- Create Strava Route/Course
- Pre-select any segments (star them)
- THEN star/auto sync the Strava Route
- Make sure your device doesn’t have an existing/older version of the route.
- If so DELETE the route before device sync with Connect
- Verify segment start/end flags are present on the course in the Connect app
- Sync to device
Now if the segment flags are missing, either it’s overlapping issue (untested) or it has a negative gradient greater than -.25 which Strava won’t sync anymore.
I hope this helps others with the kludgy implementation of live segment via a Strava Course.
This assumes you enabled Strava Live Segments correctly for Garmin.
I disabled / deleted the old IQ Strava Routes as well to avoid conflicts. I feel this was the old way to embed the flags via the IQ.
Now just starring the Strava course will sync to Garmin.
support.strava.com/.../115000919304--Syncing-Strava-Routes-to-your-Garmin-Device
