What you need to know
- COROS has added Strava Live Segments to the PACE 3/ Pro, APEX 2/ 2 Pro, VERTIX 2/ 2S, and DURA.
- 30 starred segments from your Strava Premium account will sync to your watch or bike computer.
- You can choose whether to race yourself, the fastest athlete, or people near your time.
- During a segment, your COROS watch shows your progress relative to your rival or goal time.
Strava Live Segments are a great way to spice up training runs by challenging you to beat past times or race people you've never met. COROS, one of our favorite running watch brands, is incorporating this feature into all its latest watches, catching up to rivals like Garmin and Polar.
COROS' Strava feature page runs through how to enable these Live Segments. You need a Strava Premium membership and any of the most recent PACE, APEX, and VERTIX watches (or the DURA bike computer). Your first 30 starred segments on Strava will automatically sync to the COROS app, sharing the list with your device.
Once enabled, your COROS watch will alert you and signal when you're getting close to a segment's starting point. When the segment starts, you'll see a graphic showing how your current GPS position compares to your target time, with data fields for the time ahead/behind your goal time and distance remaining to the end of the segment.
Plus, in case you're not sure of the segment's path, there'll be a second map view with an orange line to guide you.
As for what time you'll be racing against, it'll default to your "Carrot" time, aka the segment pace of the person directly above you on the segment leaderboard. But you can change it to be your "Wolf" — the person directly below you — your segment PR time, or the King/ Queen of the Mountain with the best leaderboard time.
Once you finish the segment, a pop-up notification will show your time and progress against your rival; you'll also have the option to see this data in the post-run summary.
Garmin first started supporting Strava Live Segments in 2015 with its Edge 520 bike computer, as well as many of its high-end Fenixes and Forerunners going back years — most recently the Fenix 8 and Forerunner 965. But it's always been reserved as a "premium" feature, while COROS is making it available on budget models like the PACE 3.
COROS has made a lot of progress catching up to rivals like Garmin on software features in recent months. Its September 2024 update added familiar features like gear tracking and nap detection, while other 2024 updates included daily stress, safety alerts, a wellness check, and a virtual pacer.
Equally important, COROS launched the PACE Pro, its first AMOLED running watch after years of MIP watches. Its rivals had begun to switch en masse to AMOLED over the last couple of years, making this switch long overdue. I suspect these Strava Live Segments will look especially good on the PACE Pro, and I'm excited to test it for myself.
Pace yourself against your PRs
The PACE Pro has a 20-day battery life, accurate dual-band GPS, and its full COROS training suite paired with a bright 1.3-inch AMOLED display. It has a new twice-as-fast CPU and 3X the RAM of the PACE 3, so it's built to handle Strava Live Segments and other future training features years down the line.
