{"id":7183,"date":"2017-08-20T20:08:18","date_gmt":"2017-08-20T19:08:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/?p=7183"},"modified":"2017-08-20T20:08:18","modified_gmt":"2017-08-20T19:08:18","slug":"combining-gpx-files-for-strava","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/2017\/08\/combining-gpx-files-for-strava.htm","title":{"rendered":"Combining GPX files for Strava"},"content":{"rendered":"

This morning was spent on my bike… as was a fair chunk of this afternoon… as is a fair chunk of many summer weekends, much to Mrs W’s disappointment.<\/p>\n

My friend Andy and I put in 60 miles in the sunshine, on a big loop around Milton Keynes. It seems my route planning is pretty spot on, as it was almost the exact opposite of a charity ride going the other way around<\/a> (we passed the same riders twice!). Unfortunately, my ability to “press the start button on my Garmin cycle computer<\/a>” is clearly less good – I was about a mile from home and heading out of town when I realised I’d forgotten to start tracking my ride!<\/p>\n

My OCD can’t cope with this. It would be able to\u00a0cope with turning around, going back up the hill, starting the computer and starting the ride again – but not with some missing kilometres in my ride data! Luckily, Andy was also riding with a Garmin bike computer. Even though he’d also forgotten to start his, he was wearing a Garmin watch too – so I could combine his data and mine (we’d ridden side by side for the first part of the ride…).<\/p>\n

I’ve blogged before about GPS Track Editor<\/a>, which is a fantastic piece of free software. Using this, I could edit Andy’s data to just the part I had missing, then combine it with mine and merge the two tracks (the short gap doesn’t matter – Strava will straight-line the route between the two points). I also tried merging the files with a tool from gotoes.org<\/a> – unfortunately, that ended up with a ride that was effectively double the length of what we rode (two loops). it would probably have worked with my edited files but I could also merge them in the GPS Track Editor…<\/p>\n

\"Combining<\/p>\n

I then deleted the original (short) ride from Strava and re-uploaded. Sorted.<\/p>\n

Just one thing to sort out – all of the PRs I got on today’s ride (and there were a few) were recorded as second places by the second upload. No worries – Strava has a “refresh my achievements” tool<\/a>. which sorted out that particular issue. Now my ride has the complete distance… and my achievements are correct too…<\/p>\n