Wahoo Summit Segments are now live

For quite some time now Wahoo has given you a forward-looking elevation profile of your planned route. Today it takes things one big step further as you get extra info on screens dedicated to each individual climb on your route…that’s what Wahoo calls Summit Segments and they’re available now on Roam and Bolt 2 bike computers. Here’s how they work

First Up

First up, you’ll need either a Wahoo Roam 2 or an original Roam; failing that, Bolt 2 is cool as well. Next, you’ll need to be following a route pre-loaded with the elevation details. You’re good to go.

Note: Routes created on the Elemnt and elevation profiles determined from the Elemnt own DEM model will NOT produce Wahoo Summit Segment…at least that is what I was told.

Pick a hill…any hill

Well, not exactly. You can’t set your own criteria to define a hill as of today.

Wahoo classifies a segment of your route as a hill providing it is both 500 meters long and averages over 3%. Once Wahoo has worked out all segments/hills that meet that criteria it also knows all the start and end points and there is all the information it needs to slice and dice your route, to give you a list of completed hills, upcoming hills, and your current status on a hill should you be on one.

You should find that your elevation/climbing screen lets you toggle to a list of climbs with the top-left button, as shown above.

Where is the detailed climb info?

The Summit Segment Live page is a new page that appears when you start each climb. I can’t show you one right now as I’m nowhere near any hill although it’s strange that I can’t see this page to configure it in the Elemnt app nor any of the new metrics like climb time and vertical metres to go.

Hands-On Test

I used the new Summit feature over the hills in Bath at the weekend. The feature is mostly great and the screen very useful.

Here are my issues

1. I didn’t follow my pre-loaded route and this seemed to course Summit Segments all sorts of problems. ie the hills page just didn’t sometimes appear (when they did they were awesome!)
2. Elevations from the onboard DEM model need to be applied to loaded routes that don’t have elevations
3. Wahoo needs to work on non-route-based hill features that entirely use the onboard DEM data (like Karoo 2)

Public Route Sharing

You can publically share a route on your smartphone’s Elemnt app. Thus at the start of any kind of organised event – formal or informal – anyone else within 2km from the start of the route will see the route in their Elemnt app and can select it in the same way as any other route.

Find a route like this…simple.

Take Out

These are both good features and public route sharing deserves further praise for its novelty.  I suspect most of us will use a public route at some point, either with groups of friends or at the start of an event run by an enlightened organiser. The Summit feature also seems pretty decent. I’m less interested myself in a detailed list of hills but I’m certainly interested in regularly using the Summit Segment Live screen…if I can find it