Garmin have been busy this year. This week they announced their brand new Garmin Edge Explore 1000, which is designed for tourers and adventurers, and has a clever feature which alerts loved ones in the event of an ‘incident’ or crash.

They’ve also unveiled an updated Gamin 510, in the form of a 520, and launched their tiniest ever units: the Edge 20 and 25.

All the new units alone are a feat of productivity – but yesterday they announced much bigger news.

Garmin’s new party trick will see a wide range of users able to see Strava Live Segments on their computers whilst they ride. The technology was unveiled with the launch of the Garmin Edge 520, but it’s now available for Garmin Edge 510, 810 and 1000 users.

If you’re lucky enough to benefit from the roll out, your Garmin will be automatically updated next time you plug it into Garmin Connect.

Riders will be able to see Strava data instantaneously – collecting information on their achievements vs personal bests, as well as how they performed compared to their friends, and the overall leader or QOM.

The only hitch is that the live data is available only to Strava Premium users – but updating your account costs just £3.99 a month and provides riders with extra data and training tools.

We can’t help but imagine with the hundreds of segments, partial segments and segment varieties now created on Strava, that some rides are about to be punctuated by many alerts. The stretch from the bottom of Box Hill to the National Trust Cafe, for example, is riddled with no fewer than 15 versions, including “Hairpin to Cafe” and “Box Hill Corner 2” (seriously, was one not enough?!).

Of course, though we’re likely to find the multiple alerts annoying from time to time, and we’re not sure if we want bike riding to turn into some strange warped real life computer game, we probably wouldn’t be too upset to be alerted of a new QOM…

For more information, check out this dedicated page.