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Garmin DescenderPRO – What I’d like to see by Garmin, Wahoo and Hammerhead

Hammerhead Karoo 2 Climber
climbing on KAROO

Garmin DescenderPRO – What I’d like to see

We’ve seen widespread adoption of climbing features on bike computers. I’d like to see a similar feature for descents, here’s some history and a rationale of what I’m looking for. I envisage the descent feature as a peformance-cum-safety feature, whereas I would say the climbing features are highly performance-focused.

A Potted History of Climbing Features on Bike Computers

These are the developments of climb features, I’ve used a list for the sake of brevity as most of you will already know the backstory

  1. We started with straightforward metrics like your rate of ascent [Vertical Ascent (metres) VAM] and the cumulative number of metres gained.
  2. Using elevation data, elevation graphs could be drawn in real time on your bike computer. After your workout, you were shown the complete ride profile.
  3. When following a planned ride the leading route planning platforms like Strava and RwGPS copied planned route elevation profiles from your home computer to your bike computer via GPX files. Your bike computer would use these to track your vertical progress along the planned profile and show you the remainder of the route to give an idea of what’s coming. With clever uses of zooming you might be lucky to get a good view of the next ascent you had to tackle and an indication of how far away it was and how long and steep it was.
  4. Garmin took this to a new level and pre-identified the hills in your planned ride by various criteria based on distance and grade. Each climb was treated somewhat like a Strava segment with a special screen showing live numeric climb stats plus your progress up the hill. Shading indicates the grades of each part of the climb and you can see the remaining distance to the top plus other stats. Garmin (ClimbPRO), Hammerhead Karo (Climber), Suunto (SuuntoPLUS Climb), Stages Dash (Climb), Bryton (Climb Challenge), and Magene now all have these features.
  5. Hammerhead and Garmin were early pioneers in dynamically guessing which hill you would next ascend when you rode without a pre-planned route. They need an onboard map for that along with a baked-in elevation model. Each guessed hill is treated the same way as a planned hill, there’s just a bit of extra logic linked to hill selection, usage heatmaps, re-routing, and so on.
  6. Climbs (and Strava Segments) can be stored separately by some brands in your FIT file. This helps your post-workout analysis software more easily identify and analyse your hill efforts
  7. What next? A Descent or Cornering tool?
climbing on WAHOO

 

Do I use these features?

A: Yes

I definitely use these features, my only gripe being when they appear on routes I am familiar with and I’ve forgotten to disable the feature. I probably under-use these features as I periodically disable them to avoid the annoyances.

Nevertheless, they are excellent when you are on new terrain. I would say these features are almost a prerequisite for any bike computer to be taken seriously. Just like ‘Running Track Mode’ is a feature that any credible running watch needs.

Q: But do the pros use them?

The answer is yes! Here are some links from a 2024 GCN video where they interviewed some of the Pro TdF riders with their Wahoos. Degenkolb used Wahoo Summit Freeride although like most of us didn’t call it by its given name! Intriguingly for me, Bennet used his map for descents. That got me thinking as I do that as well (I know it’s the only cycling thing we share in common!).

Using a map screen for descents is very much ad-hoc usage, although perhaps something that one of the brands could turn into a feature. Wahoo and Karoo already colour-code different parts of the ascent, it must be easy enough to apply a similar shading to the descent.

 

What Features Might DescenderPRO™ Have?

I’d like to hear your thoughts below. Here are mine.

The essence of the key descent algorithm would be linked to safety. It would be a function of speed, grade and severity of any upcoming turn coupled with an adjustment for skill level or weather conditions like precipitation, ice or wind.

Perhaps an audible alert and the screen switching to a zoomed-in map view of the upcoming hazard would be enough? I would probably only need a hundred metres or so warning but that would depend on the speed. Even on roads that I ride once every few months I sometimes forget the exact locations of certain turns, I could even leave such a DescenderPRO feature permanently enabled but I would need to be able to tweak its parameters so that it only flashed up a warning infrequently when I really needed it.

This would be a cycling-only feature and I can’t see any real use for it in slower sports like running.

Will we see a Garmin DescenderPRO™, Karoo Descender™, and SuuntoPLUS Descent™? What do you think?

 

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9 thoughts on “Garmin DescenderPRO – What I’d like to see by Garmin, Wahoo and Hammerhead”

  1. Note that Garmin sells diving watch called Descent, so name DescentPRO for feature might be confusing 🙂

  2. I suspect this is mostly about liability. The Garmin watches show descents for activities other than cycling.

    I thought this issue came up with Strava as well, where some down hill segments were banned for liability reasons. A number of years back I believe there was a downhill segment in Berkley where someone got killed going for the KOM and Strava was sued.

    Ah, just googled it and yes, Strava bans downhill segments in some cases.

  3. If I’m not mistaken all tests of climbing feature were quite negative. Which is my experience anyway. Be it only on stationary.
    It’s quite logic to expect the descending will be nothing better. (and not interesting stationary)
    Whereas quite some features that were introduced in recent years are not ‘controlable’ (no alternative way to get the same data) these ones at least are….
    With the aforementioned result.
    As climbing is a steady state effort I don’t really need to know how much longer a climb is. But idiot grades with resulting resistance are a pita.

  4. Garmin already has “sharp turn warning” and I think it’s outright dangerous: not because it might be wrong (maps aren’t always accurate!), but because the very last thing I need when approaching a turn at dangerous speed is some notification beep begging for attention, trying to distract me from a situation that needs all attention it can get. And even without the beep it would be bad, because when I do allow my eyes to wander to the screen that screen better show exactly the layout I expect and not some creative new thing conjured up just for the occasion. I do switch to map view for descending sometimes (or actually quite often), but always with a bit of guilt, because I feel like a better me would only ever rely on the street i see with my own eyes, not on some map projection that might be wrong or misread (being mistaken about the scale!). I call it wall-hack, like the cheats that some were said to use back in my counterstrike days.

    But I’m not saying that the descending experience could not be improved! There are so many things they could do better! But that’s all in the details, no name tag feature set extension:

    Better awareness for speed/expected speed in navigation prompts: just like 100m ahead of the turn is far too really, in time units, when you are crawling up a climb at barely walking speed, the same distance is much too late, in time units, when you are descending faster than most cars. And that entire topic of bogus turn notifications when you stay on the same road, but there’s also some yard access or similar going straight: nobody needs that turn indication (unless the course does insist on entering the yard). They should really, really focus more on improving the core features they have, not on adding even more questionable extensions.

    1. Hi
      yes I knew of the sharp turn warning and have had it pop up several times. it seems pretty useless to me and a feature intended for cars . eg mine would pop up warning on 90 degree bends on the flat where I was travelling at 15mph in the summer. zero issue for me, perhaps an issue for a car doing 40mph

      agreed on the eyes wandering to the screen too often but I’ve been going 80kmh down french mountains where i have no idea what’s ahead (in detail). I have to look at the map.

      the distance from the turn where I envisage an alert showing would be impacted by speed, grade and severity of turn

  5. Also it could tell you about any jumps, if they are tabletops or gaps or drops and their size.

    1. Totally agree – thinking downhill on Sella Ronda, with severe bumps just before tight corners

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