How to add Distance to Treadmill or Indoor workouts for Strava [Solved]

[fulmar2]

A number of users have approached me about the FIT or TCX files being produced by their treadmills or indoor trainers. Sometimes, the distance field AND the GPS position is absent, meaning that they receive a distance of 0 when uploading to Strava. If you have the GPS position (latitude/longitude from a map), Strava can calculate the distance. If both are missing, you need GOTOES to fix it. There are two solutions that I will discuss here:

Solution #1 to fixing distance in GPS files:

Step 1: Upload your file(s) here.
Step 2: If none of your GPS tracks have distance or position, you should see a link to add in the distance (see screenshot):

The section "This Indoor Workout has no Distance or Position" only appears if both are absent from your files.

Step 3: Make Sure that you have selected "TCX" or "FIT" as your "Output File Format. Distance can only be stored in one of those two fields.
Step 4: Click the big blue button at the bottom, and you will now have distance in your GPS file! You can optionally check the "Send to Strava" box to save yourself from having to upload the distance-edited file to Strava manually.

Solution #2 to fixing distance in GPS files:

This solution only works if your source file has speed (but not distance or position). This could happen with certain treadmills or indoor trainers.

Step 1: Upload your file(s) here.
Step 2: In the "Calculating Speed" field, please select "Use Speed" as shown below:

Select "Use Speed." The page will reload, and if your source file has speed (but not distance), your GPS file should now display distance which was calculated from the speed in your file.

Step 3: The page will reload, and if speed is present in the source GPS file, you should now see a distance checkbox in the "Streams" area of your file.
Step 4: Click the big blue button at the bottom, and you will now have distance in your GPS file! You can optionally check the "Send to Strava" box to save yourself from having to upload the distance-edited file to Strava manually.

Happy training indoors!!

[GotoesUser]

I was about to try to add the fake track but it seems that the option is not available for my indoor workout (Screenshot). I tried changing the activity type to Biking, Spin Cycling or Road Cycling but the option did not show up.

One more thing, I am able to import the FIT file that I get from the commercial bike app to the COROS portial. This file only contains POWER data (before merging in HR data via GOTOES) and no GPS information but works fine.

Something else has caught my attention with these files. The FIT file from the bike has some form of embedded total distance. The Strava activity of it shows it and also when I load that file into COROS, it shows the correct workout distance from the indoor bike. However, when I use the merger tool, it indicates that the files does not have an embedded distance and the option "Use Existing Embedded Distance" is disabled. The resulting merged file then shows on Strava as 0km distance.

Any thought why this is not properly detected?

Here is an excerpt from your fitfileviewer and the merge tool. I also added the fit file as an attachment.

[fulmar2]

OK, you were definitely on the right track to use the FIT file viewer, and you’re asking the right questions! So, I will need to explain a bit… Strava is a “motion based” platform where the idea is to show how a person moved over a certain route over time; it started with outdoor tracks which had a map. From GPS coordinates and time stamps, you can calculate speed and distance (remember “Distance equals rate times time” from school?).

Anyway, GOTOES tries to resolve this, first by looking for the “embedded” distance. The best way is to look at the accumulated distance in the distance column. The reason GOTOES prefers that is because that is what Strava does (Strava initially ignores the “speed” column, and instead uses the distance column to calculate your speed graph).

So, if you look at both of your files, you will notice that the entire distance column is zero:

No Distance in the GPS file

But GOTOES knows that some devices do not include distance - especially indoor trainers.. so to resolve that, I added a feature to backwards-calculate distance using speed. That way, we could reverse-calculate distance… and then convert it to speed:

Try to use speed to calculate distance

Unfortunately, I looked at both of your trainer files, and they do not have speed either!!

Empty Speed too!

So, now we have two files that are lacking GPS coordinates (because indoors), Speed recordings, and distance recordings. In other words, there is zero data about movement over time, so it is impossible to generate a speed or distance graph on any platform.

You’re not the first person to have no movement information…. and so I added a feature where the user could enter the distance; GOTOES would warn the user that the distance (and all ways of calculating it) were absent. When you use this feature, GOTOES puts in a flat-line speed (i.e. if you say you did 12mph, you will be going 12mph throughout the entire activity). When you enter a number (either miles or kilometers), GOTOES calculates the distance for each point:

GOTOES can fabricate distance from an average speed as a last resort.

Once you enter a distance, you will THEN be given the chance to “Generate a Fake Track.” The reason that option did not appear previously is because without any of the 3 critical values (GPS Coordinates, Distance, Speed), it is impossible to calculate the distance over time required to create the map.

** Historically, Strava would ONLY look in the distance column. As you noted, in the Session, a distance is supplied, but because Strava has always been about distance over time (and graphing your speed), they would ignore the “overall” distance and speed - and use the distance from the distance column.

I hope this explains how to solve the issue… basically, you just need to enter the total distance using the “Embedding Distance” part that I put in red above. That red line shows to alert the user that this is super important. I have just added a flashing caution icon to make it more obvious. Hope that helps!