Let's talk about the climb guidance feature or often the lack of thereof

[sky-runner]

“Suunto’s Climb Guidance prepares you for the terrain ahead” proclaims this article on suunto.com. Well, based on my experience I have to disagree. I wanted to discuss it in this thread.

At the top of the article there is screenshot of Suunto App that shows climbs during the planing phases in the app that looks like this:

Please note how clean the profile looks with just a few very distinct phases - a long climb followed by a long descent, then some slight uphill, and finally a downhill. Perhaps that is fine for a very short 7.6km run. Looking at numbers in the screenshot the terrain seems to be rather steep, and the climb guidance feature works decently well on a very steep terrain.

But let’s take a looks at what users like me may encounter in reality. Here is a profile from my recent 100K race - note that the projected total ascent is 11079 feet:

Here is what the actual elevation profile was after finishing the race - the actual total ascent was was 13055 ft, which is 18% more than projected:

Now let’s zoom into the two segments where I had the most frustrating experience with the climb guidance vs. what I actually experienced - they both are highlighted on the pictures above.
[1]:

[2]:

What we see in this zoomed in climb guidance profiles from the app and what I have experienced during the run is that it tends to break the elevation profile into sections based on average grade rather than the actual lowest and highest points in the route. What that means is that:

1. Every climb always start a bit too late - usually I am already climbing for 1-2 minutes before the climb starts in the climb guidance, and that is worse on rolling terrain. That is probably because it takes some time for the average grade to change.
2. Similarly, every descent ends too early. Often it tells me I have reached the end of the climb, but in reality I may still be halfway through the climb, perhaps with a bit less steep part of it ahead of me.
3. It has a tendency of breaking long climbs into seemingly arbitrary sections. For example it may tell me a tiny 27 feet climb is coming. But then when it ends it immediately shows another tiny climb, then another, even though they all a part of a longer climb. It may arbitrarily break a longer climb into multiple fairly short sections of steep climb, less steep climb, a flat section which is in reality continues climbing, then another less steep climb, etc.

All of the above is quite frustrating when you are already multiple hours into an ultramarathon race. Consider the following. I don’t care whether a 5% uphill climb section changes to a 10% uphill - I don’t need this broken up. I need to know further ahead - when the overall climb ends. I need to know, for example, whether to retrieve and my hiking poles or to stash them - that takes some time and effort. I need to know how to time my nutrition to the climb. I need to have a real guidance to know what’s further ahead rather than just 0.2 mile ahead. I’d rather have my watch showing me a 3 mile rolling terrain section with general uphill trend then a bunch of tiny climbs, flat sections, and descents.

This is especially visible in the first highlighted section. You can see on the actual profile that that was 2 fairly distinct climbs, but according to my watch it looked like a mostly “flat” section with just a few very short gradual low grade uphills. Wrong! The second highlighted section is perhaps trickier, but even in that case there are some clear uphill and downhill trends. For example, the first small climb was in reality a continuation of the previous big climb as the flat section between them was fairly short. There is absolutely no reason to break that part of the profile into 30 (!) distinct segments - that’s not useful at all! Some of those segments were so short that the watch didn’t even notify me about them and they just got skipped! Because of that, for example, I observed, a gradual climb segment ending and being immediately replaced with another gradual climb!

Furthermore, the overall elevation profile for the entire race was completely unusable on the watch at this scale. It lacked details so much that even the last two larger climbs that are nearly 1000 feet each were nearly invisible on it. But at the same time, breaking it into sections doesn’t help because it is impossible to scroll forward to see what’s coming next.

To summarize, what would really improve the experience is the following:

1. to have a bit of a bigger picture where you can see clearly what’s coming next with useful details. This can be achieved by a combination of zooming and panning of the profile similarly to how we can zoom and pan the map. Or perhaps we should be able to scroll through individual segments in the climb guidance.
2. When in an ultramarathon on foot, a specific grade of a climb less important than knowing where the overall climb starts and ends because the race execution strategy depends on that. Perhaps, how exactly the overall profile is broken into segments should be proportional to the overall distance, and it should reflect the trends rather than tiny changes in the grade. Then furthermore, each climb section may use multiple colors to convey the grade within that bigger climb - that’s what Garmin does and that works much better. If if there is a small downhill within a much larger climbs, Garmin doesn’t break it into two separate climbs but shows flat or downhill section within a larger climb using color coding.

I’d like to hear what experience others have had with the climb guidance feature. Do you think the current implementation needs some further improvements?

[Brad_Olwin]

@sky-runner Must be terrain dependent as I have somewhat the opposite experience. My long and steep climbs are often interspersed with somewhat flatter sections but show one long climb in guidance. I have not experienced late or delayed notifications.

[Tieutieu]

I have already reported and noticed that i suspect that climb guidance is based on « distance from start » of the route instead of « current gps position ».
My feeling is that if I start a climbing section witch start at 25km from start of the route, and if the watch has already mesures 25km few meters before the gps point where the climb was supposed to start, then the climb guidance for this climb willl start at the 25km point mesured by the watch.
From my experience the further you are in the route, the most is guidance « delayed ».
But I have never take time to really verify that feeling, I may be wrong (@isazi i remember you said to me that I was mistaken about the behaviour).