After getting back home from completing Lumberjack 100 I was excited to review the logged data from my Garmin Edge 500 bike computer. A few times during the ride the unit lost GPS signal, but as I’ve had this happen on other rides without issue I didn’t pay it much attention. Unfortunately, it looks like this time the data really went odd. After poking with the data and attempting to correct it in Ascent I downloaded Fit File Repair Tool to see what it could tell me.
As shown in the screenshot above (click to embiggen), roughly 15.52 miles in, at 44.2119°N 86.1295°W, just beyond the Steinberg Road crossing in Road Monkey during my first lap (map here), the recorded time suddenly jumped from June 15, 2013 to October 19, 2019. This explains the strange duration I’d been seeing in analysis software, with everything from Ascent and Strava both reporting an elapsed time of around 55619:03:11, the length of a ride which I don’t quite think the Edge 500’s battery would endure, but which matches the 6-some year offset. Weirdly, Garmin Connect doesn’t show the issue (link), almost as if they filter out this problem.
When this issue occurred my Garmin was running firmware v3.00, something which I was hesitant to change soon before the race. Since the changelog to v3.20 only lists two minor changes which aren’t useful for me (power meter serial number display and a change to support manufacturing) I didn’t see a good reason to rush to upgrade. It’d also worked otherwise well for long rides, so I didn’t anticipate any problems. I upgraded the unit to v3.20 today and I’ll see if similar problems arise, but I can’t imagine I’ll be doing that length of ride any time soon, so it’ll be hard to get an equivalent test.
If any of you wish to review this damaged FIT file from Lumberjack 100 it can be found here: svigneau_2013_lumberjack100.fit.
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