A bit of follow-up:
Today I did a local 50k race which includes 3 different loops to the top of the mountain with a shared descent, a shared aid station at the top, and a shared aid station at the bottom.
Here is how it looks like.
[image: 1778377115267-screenshot-2026-05-09-at-6.37.23-pm.png]
Obviously, I wanted a single GPX route for the entire race to track the climbing and not have to mess with the watch during the race. Also I wanted to track the distances to the aid stations.
Overall, Climbing guidance v3 worked satisfactory and was helpful but it wasn’t without issues:
Issue #1. When I imported the the GPX file from the race website, I was unable to place waypoints on the route so that a single waypoint covered multiple distances The waypoint (aid station) at the bottom is visited 4 times at various distances and the waypoint at the top is visited 3 times at various distances. I just couldn’t make that work. Whenever I tried to place a waypoint it was inserted for just one randomly picked distance on the route.
Finally I decided to just re-draw the entire route from scratch in Suunto App, and only after that placing a single waypoint would make it match multiple distances as shown on the elevation profile above. That’s what I wanted from the beginning.
I don’t know what is the difference, but I suspect when a route gets imported it probably gets simplified and loses resolution (the number of points along the route). It seems that there is no interpolation of segments between route points, which would explain this issue. I saw some evidence of the low resolution because some parts of the imported route looked like straight squiggly lines, but when I create the same route in Suunto App it looks far more precise. By the way, that isn’t a problem in Strava. When I import the same GPX route in Strava, it doesn’t lose resolution.
Issue #2 - The same as already covered above. When Suunto App finally managed to insert waypoints, when that applied to turnarounds, it ended up creating multiple waypoints at a short distance (a few meters) from each other. As I explained above, that was a problem for zooming the elevation profile, which now didn’t work as expected. It is nearly impossible to insert a single waypoint at a turnaround because the app simple doesn’t have enough precision.
Issue #3 - For the most part the watch was able to stick to the planned route even thought the route is very complex with multiple shared parts. However in the beginning of the 3rd loop it decided to switch me to another loop - the one that I had already finished. I am pretty sure I followed the route perfectly, so there was absolutely no reason for it to switch. I could see that because it notified me about a wrong climb (the wrong climb elevation gain). Then, after I continued on the correct loop - the one that was planned in the route - after a few minutes the watch corrected itself.
Issue #4 - The most zoomed-in climbing guidance view - the one that shows individual climbs - was messed up again. I didn’t normally look at it during the race, but at least on one occasion it showed me on a descent when I was in fact climbing. This issue has already been discussed above.
