i2runner

Garmin to Excel data crunching

Last Friday while chatting on takbo.ph’s shoutbox, “Winceth” (Patrick) asked a question on how to edit the data taken from garmin. Then “Crashandburn” (Neil Barrios) informed us that we could actually open Garmin’s data from Garmin Training Center® by first exporting a run or workout and then saving it as *.tcx file.

Highlight the race/workout desired, then click:
File–>Export–>Export “ ”

Then save the file as *.tcx.

This *.tcx file could then be opened by Microsoft Excel. It was so simple, why didn’t I try that before? Now our race or training data could be better manipulated, analyzed and graphed with excel. The tables need a little getting used to. One of the columns have data for distance traveled in meters, and there’s another column for the time (with date). Other columns have additional data for Heart Rate, Longitude, Lattitude & Altitude, while the rest I still don’t know what they’re for. You will need a little crunching to get the time interval between difference in intervals to get the speed, and you’ll just need to convert it to pace/mi or pace/km with some common sense formulas.

What I didn’t like in Garmin’s software was its inability to zoom into the paces or limit the graph’s Y-axis pace. For instance, my marathon pace was around 9minutes/mile, but due to the noises and spikes of garmin, I had some readings at 17minute/mile pace so the Y-axis of the graph would reach that point. Therefore, I couldn’t zoom or look closer to 9min/mile of the graph. This is the reason why I didn’t post this graph on my Milo Marathon blog. I will use this technique next time.

Now compare the two graphs below from the same race. The first one is the raw graph from garmin connect, where it shows the slowest pace I had was 17min/mile.

connect.garmin.com

Now I don’t care about that, I would rather zoom to the relevant pace by limiting the maximum of Y-axis of the graph to 11min/mile, and the minimum to 4min/mile. Then I only took the kilometer splits to get a cleaner data. Now the difference is shown below. Doesn’t it look cleaner and more understandable?

EXCELLent!!!

Thanks to takbo.ph’s shoutbox chatroom and to Neil and Patrick, I am now able to better understand my workout to the smallest resolution of Garmin Forerunner 405, which I think is approximately 5-second interval data-points.

Please feel free to comment if you need clarifications or some techniques in manipulating your graph data. You can also email me at zixednatz@gmail.com, I’m just glad to be of any help