/ Fitness

Fitness Stats using Garmin Forerunner on Ubuntu 15.10

I resurrected my Gamin Forerunner from my hardware archives and started using it on my workouts. Now, I plan to use the data from my Garmin Forerunner to plot interesting stats.

To my surprise, getting the data out of my decade old (2008!) Garmin Forerunner on Ubuntu 15.10 turned out to be very simple and straightforward! Getting the data on my Macbook running OS X (El Capitan) was actually a bigger pain! However, I managed to get the data on my OS x too like I described here.

Installations

sudo pip install pyusb --pre
  • I was lucky to find a package to extract the Garmin data without an issues! The data gets extract in proprietary Garmin format (.gmn files) that can be extracted to well formed xml data in .tcx files! Steps outlined below!
sudo apt-get install garmin-forerunner-tools libxml2-utils

mkdir -p ~/gitlocal

cd ~/gitlocal/

git clone https://github.com/cstrelioff/garmin-dev.git

mkdir -p ~/GarminData

cd ~/GarminData

garmin_save_runs

mkdir -p ~/GarminData/tcxfiles

cd ~/GarminData/tcxfiles/

~/gitlocal/garmin-dev/gmn2tcx ~/GarminData/2016/01/20160122T111803.gmn > run-name.tcx

The data extracted is actually pretty darn detailed. Love it! The data includes lots of stuff particularly ...

  • Timestamp
  • Position (Lat & Long)
  • Altitude (oooh!)
  • Heart Rate (FTW!)

Workout data in Garmin tcx files

References