False abnormal heart rate alerts from Forerunner during Edge 1040 bike climbs

This is what normalization of failure looks like:

Two “Abnormal Heart Rate” alerts by the Forerunner 965, while recording a ride with the Edge 1040.
What’s worse: this timeline is generated by Garmin itself. No reconciliation. No adjustment. Just raw data passed as valid — even when the contradiction is visible from a mile away.

My Forerunner is set as both primary wearable and primary training device. That gives it arbitration power — if data sources conflict, its version is considered the truth.
But that role doesn’t excuse the device from being aware of its environment.

It’s not a lack of sensors:
The watch has GPS — it sees you’re moving at 10 km/h.
It has a barometer — it knows you're climbing, with a VAM over 700.
It can even predict the type of activity with decent accuracy — that’s if it even bothers to guess what’s actually going on.

It’s not a lack of connectivity either:
They both "speak" Bluetooth and ANT+.
They’re both connected to the same phone. Maybe there are technical limitations to using the phone as a proxy or cache — but the communication channels are there.

Here’s the conversation that never happens:

“Hey Edge, you sleep in the garage. I'm sleeping in bed!”
“Hey watch, my battery’s bigger than yours!”
“Anyway — I’m recording a bike workout. The user is pushing hard. HR is high, power is low. It’s not his day.”
“That’s what you think — I figured he must be driving uphill, stuck behind a cyclist, so frustrated that he’s having a cardiac event.”
“I’ve got a chest HRM. You can disable OHR.”
“I’ve got multiband GNSS. You can pull location from me.”
“Temperature? Already covered.”
“Save your battery — but let’s both keep an eye on the accelerometers in case of a crash. A fast descent is coming, and there’s a KOM segment too.”

That’s what I’d call smart.
Not a few positive words slapped together by an LLM based on ride stats.

And what do I actually get?

The descent starts. The watch vibrates — again. I already know what it wants.
It’s the hundredth time it does this.
Trying to stop it is dangerous. Pressing the button mid-descent? No thanks.
So it buzzes blindly. Uselessly.

And the advice from the forums?

“Just disable the feature.”
“Make the best of it.”

No thanks. We deserve better.
PS:
I took the KOMs anyway, both the final part of the climb and the descent.
Good enough for someone in the middle of a Forerunner-classified heart crisis.

You can also let the activity run alongside your 1040 on your FR. Then you kill two birds with one stone: you are rid of your abnormal heart rate alarms and you feel your Varia notifications on your wrist. Unless you are the exception who can hear the beeps of the 1040 above the surrounding noise, thats also an advantage from a safety perspective, so you can fully focus on your KOM matters without getting frustrated for the 101st time.

Thanks for the suggestion and I appreciate the intention.

This issue has been bothering me for years — and based on older threads that were quietly closed without resolution, it’s clearly affected quite a few others as well so I’ve tried the dual-recording setup many times, hoping for better results — but the outcome was consistently unpredictable.

Initially I didn’t try this as a workaround: I genuinely thought this was the intended way to use the devices. Start the activity on both the Edge and the Forerunner, and they’ll work together, right? They’ll combine sensor data, correct each other’s errors, and improve accuracy through some kind of magical sensor fusion.

Oh, how wrong I was.

In practice, what I got was complete unpredictability: — conflicts, dropped sensors, accessories going haywire. I ruled it out in the initial post:

5155879 said:

I’ve tried recording the activity with the watch as well, but that causes major conflicts: sensors go haywire, and devices like the Varia radar and smart lights stop working reliably

The chaos of having two devices trying to manage the same sensors and accessories is hard to describe without going completely off-topic, but I’ll never forget one particular night: thick fog, a few degrees below freezing, deep in the woods, doing squats to stay warm while rebooting both devices and accessories, pairing and unpairing to get sensors and lights working again. And all of this was happening in an area where people feed feral dogs,
who were loudly expressing their displeasure at my presence just a few meters away, somewhere in the bushes.

I’m sharing all this not just out of frustration, but to highlight something more important:
It’s deeply discouraging to see users resigned in the face of an issue neglected by the vendor for years, comforting each other in the absence of hope, as if Garmin were long gone and we were just left with the problem, even though the consequences can be serious.