Currently it is difficult to use garmin watches to pace yourself on a mountain/trail races. It works very well on flat road races (e.g. via pace pro or similar), but when significant vertical gain enters the equation, there are no good solutions left, see e.g.
This is a relatively simple to implement suggestion that improves the "time ahead/behind" pacer to be a viable pacing tool.
When you follow a course that has a pacer inside it, you can get "Time ahead/behind", which tells you your time difference to the pacer. You also get a visual indication through the "gray arrow" on the map as to where this pacer is compared to yourself.
This is a great tool to pace something like a trail-race, provided you can generate a course with a accurate pacer inside. There are third party websites that can do this, e.g. plotaroute.com - that create a pacer that accurately reflects slowing down on uphills etc. Ideally at some future point the virtual pacers that garmin automatically generates could also be of this quality on mountainous terrain, but for now this is not the case.
The main problem with this feature that prevent from using it well as a race pacer:
- The ahead/behind time will reset to zero if the watch ever leaves the course (Off-course notification). To pace yourself in a race you would want the timer to continue. Why would you go off-course in a race? In a trail race it can happen that the plot isn't perfect, and you have to take a different path, or you might even miss a fork and go wrong for a bit, or have to go to the side e.g. for a toilet break. Additionally it has happened to me that the watch incorrectly says "Off-Track" in situations where the GPS is not so good, even though I did not go off track at all.
Suggestion: Add a setting (e.g. in the sport mode setting, e.g. "Trail Run Settings") to configure the behavior of "Off Course":
"Pacer after going off course": "Reset pacer" / "Continue pacer"
If you check the forums there have been many posts over the years for all kinds of Garmin products (mostly Edge bike computers and Forerunner/Fenix watches) where people complain about the pacer resetting when you leave course. This was not happening ~3 years back, but was changed to the current behavior (e.g. Forerunner 935 did not have this issue!), example posts:
forums.garmin.com/.../virtual-partner-resetting
forums.garmin.com/.../stop-virtual-partner-resetting-when-taking-a-detour
forums.garmin.com/.../virtual-partner-v10-00
forums.garmin.com/.../virtual-partner-v6-00
forums.garmin.com/.../pacing-for-trail-mountain-pacepro-unusable-virtualpacer-keeps-resetting
This request is intentionally held as a very small and manageable complexity, as to provide best bang for the buck, hoping you can find time for it.
Bonus idea
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The pacer inside the course could also be used in various different data-fields to greatly improve their worth:
- Timer Fields -> Estimated finish time
- Navigation Fields -> ETE
- Navigation Fields -> ETA
- Navigation Fields -> ETA at Next
- Navigation Fields -> Time to Next
Currently these fields are implemented very naively, using the average pace so far and the distance - which is fine for a flat road race, but if just did 5km up a mountain in 1 hour then the estimated finish time will say 2 hours if you run the same back down, which is of course a joke.
When following a course with a pacer inside, instead: Take the time of the pacer from the position you are at to the finish (or next waypoint). Additionally, this time should be scaled by the ahead/behind status so far, e.g. race with 4h pacer, but I am currently going faster than the pacer, at 105% of the pacer speed so far after half the race, then the remaining race, which is 2 more hours according to the pacer, could be estimated as 2h/1.05 = 1h54m
With this more useful "ETA at Next" and "Time to Next" fields it would also be great to be able to configure the "Up Ahead" navigation data screen, which currently shows the distance to the next way-points, to instead show the "time to next" instead. This would be much more useful for trail-races than the distance, as sometimes 5km might be 1 hour of ascent, sometimes it might be much less than half an hour.
