Actual climbing error in perm submission

[Geoff Hazel]

Today was my first perm result submission and when I got to “actual climbing” I wasn’t sure what to enter. My Wahoo had 1300 ft and RideWithGps had double that. Anyway I decided to enter actual from the wahoo which was closer to but higher than the “official” number and it errored “your number is too high “. All it would take was the official number. 

So what’s the point of asking?

[Charlie Martin]

Hi Geoff, the reason this is asked during results submission is explained in the 2026 Climbing FAQ for Riders in the following section:

What if I skip some climbing by free-routing?

The results submission page will offer a field for reporting a lower amount of climbing due to free-routing. No credit will be awarded for doing extra climbing. That said, an appropriately controlled route should make it difficult to find a shorter/easier path that visits all the controls, so most likely if you've found a way to reduce the climbing, it involves making life more difficult in some other fashion.

Unless you were free-routing, the guideline is to just stick with the default value which is the official RideWithGPS route on file. As for why that's the standard, that's also in the FAQ.

- Charlie

On Tue, Jan 27, 2026 at 7:16 PM Geoff Hazel <geoff...@gmail.com> wrote:

Today was my first perm result submission and when I got to “actual climbing” I wasn’t sure what to enter. My Wahoo had 1300 ft and RideWithGps had double that. Anyway I decided to enter actual from the wahoo which was closer to but higher than the “official” number and it errored “your number is too high “. All it would take was the official number. 

So what’s the point of asking?

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[Bill Gobie]

We have to use some standard even though there are instances where it is wildly wrong. The elevation profile of the out & back you rode (1354) is not even self-consistent. The elevation profile of the return does not match the outbound leg.

I proposed crowd-sourcing observed climbing but the large difference between your Wahoo's number and RwGPS's interpretation of the same data shows the drawback to that.

Bill

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