Garmin Delayed Race Autostart – I’d like to see it expanded and taken up by Wahoo

Opinion/edited

We all do it.

Press GO to start your workout or race. Press stop just as you cross the finish line on race day. The recorded activity gets posted in full glory to Strava as proof of your exploits.

Even watching the Olympic time Trials I feigned surprise to see some of the very best cyclists in the world pressing the stop button just after crossing the line. In non-TT road races, it’s not unusual to see someone celebrating before crossing the line but God forbid anyone to press that stop button until the line is well and truly crossed. That would be Strava Sacrilege at its very worst.

But what about when you start a race? What if you are balancing precariously on a TT bike? What if you are treading water in the sea at the start of a triathlon? How do you press GO then?

Auto starting, pausing and stopping – current state of play

Autopause – one of my petty annoyances is other people using autopause. As group rides stop at red lights or coffee shops there is invariably a cacophony of audible bleeps to shame the riders who have chosen autopause. Perhaps they do that to save battery, maintain a correct average moving speed or try to boost their average power for the ride incorrectly. I can’t claim to know everyone’s motivations, I keep mine running.

Garmin has a rather nifty auto-transition feature. It seems to work solely on queues from GPS to reasonably accurately determine your switch from one sport to another during a multisport event. It’s a shame it can’t use power to determine a switch between cycling and running on an indoor trainer but, that aside, it’s a rather handy feature to leave you one less thing to worry about on race day. It is a way of automatically starting/stopping sports.

Garmin also enables you to stop a workout and resume it later, perhaps doing something else in the interim.

Garmin’s first pass at this was the Edge x30 series where Edge cycling activities can be auto-started based on a customisable minimum threshold speed, defaulting to 10km/h.

Next, when using LiveTrack, Garmin has an auto-start feature to start location sharing automatically.

Finally there is a Swim countdown timer as an alert to to the next set starting when swimming with Forerunners/Fenix watches

Could Garmin improve the automation for other types of races?

How do the Pros start their Garmin/Wahoo for Time Trials?

Even at an amateur level, you start a Time Trial clipped into your pedals, trusting someone to hold the bike upright for you.

I didn’t look closely at the racers starting their Paris Time Trials. But on the occasions I looked, no one seemed to be pressing the GO button as they accelerated and descended the start ramp. I’m assuming they all pressed the ‘STOP’ button at some point after finishing…so at what point did they start recording?

Perhaps, like me, they started recording a few tens of seconds earlier. At the end of the race, I’m happy to either look at the power-duration curve (which isn’t affected by starting the activity earlier) or if I wanted to I could relatively easily truncate the workout file by looking for when the power kicked in. Perhaps someone in Remco Evenepoel’s team did the FIT file editing for him!

A Feature Request

Garmin’s “Starting the Timer Automatically” feature handles this scenario for cycling races when using an Edge 530 or newer. It would be nice to have the same option for more of the watches. It’s not on the FR965 AFAIK. It would also be good to have the feature triggered by power rather than speed to avoid scenarios where your Edge might inadvertently start recording in a moving car or in built-up areas where poor GPS reception might trigger an incorrect speed value.

Of course, it would be great for Wahoo to add this…period!

I also want a precise method to pre-start a triathlon race or open water swim on a Garmin Forerunner.  Perhaps the detection of two properly made front crawl strokes could trigger the recording to start? GPS could be used as the trigger but triathlon races often require treading water at the start with the watch submerged, getting a GPS fix immediately after starting isn’t straightforward.

Q: How do you start your device on race day?

I might write a few similar articles to this for other features I have in mind (perhaps some will be a little more exciting than this one!). Let me know if there are any features you’d like to see covered that should be possible with today’s existing technology.