How do you navigate a route that starts and finishes at the same place

Go a bit before starting the course. 

That kind of defeats the point. I want to cycle, not have to stop to load up the garmin and start the route up after I’ve started it.

That kind of defeats the point. I want to cycle, not have to stop to load up the garmin and start the route up after I’ve started it.

Oh well!

You wanted to know how to deal with it.

I told you how to deal with it.

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For routes you create, don't bring the route all the way back to the start.

Sgt_Stress said:

Problem here is that your only turning on the Garmin right at the start point.

No, that's not the reason.

The Garmins are designed to pick up the route at the nearest point. This lets you use the route anywhere along it.

This causes a problem if you happen to be closer to the end point than the start point when you load the course.

It's an old problem: it was an issue with the 800 and it's an issue all the way to the 1030+.

Fair enough. But this is how this problem (or perhaps a similar problem manifests for me). If I have a looped course, where start point is exact same point as the end point, and I don't have good GPS fix it will just end the course as it thinks I've finished. My solution was to turn on the Garmin just a bit before the start/end point and never see this issue now.

It doesn't make sense that a bad fix is the cause of it.

The unit gets a location, bad or not, and uses it.

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I see this problem fairly regularly and have for years.

It has a simple and easy-to-understand cause.

I do group rides and know that people in the group using Garmins will have problems based on the distance to the end point being shorter than the distance to the start point.

We happen to have a start point where this issue happens regularly since we started to now use a different parking lot that is closer to the end point than to the start point of a bunch of routes.

For your own routes, ending the course a bit earlier is an easy fix. 

Well perhaps mine is a bit of an edge case but I've not had to move the end point to fix the problem for me. End / start point are the same location, I just start the Garmin a little way from from the start / end point.

It's not likely that your unit happens to behave differently than all the others.

Its also rare that the start point and the end point are exactly the same. 

Again, the the problem is fairly common and old and has a simple and easy-to-understand cause. It's just picking the point on the course that is nearest to what the unit is seeing as your current location.

(Anyway, if yours is an "edge case", then it won't be much use to the OP.)

I always finish my route 100m before the start point and this helps this issue. Even if the unit gets confused when you first start, in my experience, it will figure it out within 5 minutes if you leave it alone and just ride your route.

I have had an issue with an out and back TT though, it just recalculated the whole time and was totally useless, so above advice isn't 100%.

MB