For far too long I've desired to amalgamate all my old run data onto Strava, but the task seemed far too large to tackle during race directing season. With the series finale of the Coast Mountain Trail Series in the books as of October 10th I am finally able to focus a bit of energy towards other projects, and this was near the top of my list.
I started on the onerous path of downloading and uploading a single file at a time. It was taking me approximately a minute per file or thirty minutes per month of archived training. I set in on a tackling two months per night at the end of my day, and after two days I finally stepped back and said out loud "there has to be a better f-ing way than this."
Of course there was a better way and a simple google search will answer this for you, as it did for me. I am not here to tell you anything more than is already posted on the ole interwebs, rather I'm going to briefly describe how GD easy it was for me to accomplish this once I landed on the service that seemed the easiest and cheapest to use.
Tapiriik at https://tapiriik.com/
There's a donation button that starts at $5. Apparently you can contribute as little as $2 but I figured if this thing actually worked that $5 was a near theft on my part.
You simply login each of your respective accounts, hit sync and voila! Done and done! In my case I had over 800 files on my old Garminconnect account that I wished to upload to Strava. You can choose to sync in any direction, between 13 different service providers, or basically every service but Movescount (insert sad face). No biggie though, all my data was synced in a matter of hours.
Quick tip: Most of my Garminconnect files were listed as private, so they initially wouldn't sync. I scrolled through over 800 files to change the setting from private to public and then it synced instantly. Of course immediately after accomplishing this I hovered over the Garmin box to see a settings button appear. Clicking on this button allows you to mass select "sync all private files too". Damn. Oh well.
For just $5 Tapiriik automatically added over 800 files with over 1400 hours and 8600 miles to my Strava files. I can now look back through 2009 to view my entire training history and it's proven quite insightful, through my lost year and subsequent comeback after twice breaking my foot, to the correlation to race day successes via consistency in training over months and even the full year leading into an event. It's nice to host everything in a single space (or multiple spaces if you sync all your services) and no one can touch Strava for how they display and present your data.
So there you have it, if you've been considering updating your Strava account with your historic GPS data, it's as easy as $5 and five minutes. Have at er!
If you hadn't already noticed this is my new website, I hope you like the layout. I haven't delved into it too far just yet and will get to that in the coming months, but I figured first things first, it was time to post a blog for the first time since August 8th. Typically at this time of year I attempt to catch up on the things I can't stay on top of during event season and this year is no different. I'm hopeful to maybe even get a few race reports and/or trip reports posted in the next few months as well, just don't hold me to that :)
GR