Half marathon distance completed

By combining a regular run with the ParkRun and an extra loop home I managed to cobble together a half-marathon. It did include 16 minutes in 3 breaks between the segments so it wasn't continuous, but very nearly so. At least that is a 'target' beaten and by no means was it an easy course as it included 438m of ascent, a snow covered 500m and a sub-25 minute 5k near the end. I'm content with under 2 hours (moving time) for that (note that it is TWICE world record time).

Significantly the sun was out and I ran the 5k without a jacket! Perhaps it really is spring now?

GPX issue solved

I had a reply from Strava support about my problematic GPX track but it wasn't all that helpful. Anyway I now have a solution and knowledge of the issue. It seems that Strava doesn't like trackpoints that are separated by minutes; seconds is fine. I assume this has something to do with its stop/go algorithm and is clearly more fussy than other packages. I tracked this down by using Adze to overwrite the timestamp to 1 minute and then 30 second intervals. As the time got shorter, the quality of parsing by Strava improved. So did my reported speed though so that wasn't enough. I needed to remake my track with a high frequency of points. 

So I used the command line of GPSBabel to interpolate points at 10s intervals as described in the documentation:

gpsbabel -i gpx -f track.gpx -x interpolate,time=10 -o gpx -F newtrack.gpx

Unfortunately that generated an extra spur of travelling but that was easily deleted with Adze, and as it was only a single point it didn't disturb the total time significantly.

I can't set my 12XL to record at 10s intervals though as on a day hike the memory would be exceeded and it would also drain the battery; at 2 minute sampling it lasts a very long day, unlike my Forerunner 110 which only manages 3 hours. Perhaps due to its high sampling rate?

GPS12XL or GPX import issue

Whilst on the Easter break we did a lovely walk from Carbis Bay to Zennor and back. The weather was photogenic but ever so cold for the time of year.

The South West Coast east of St Ives

An undulating 20km hike seems like a fair training event and so I wanted to include it on Strava. I took my (rather old) Garmin 12XL along to record the track. I exported the data via serial port, converted to GPX and then uploaded to Strava. Now the 12XL doesn't include elevation data in the track which is fair enough but I get a rubbish travel time, so much so that my average pace is 10s/km.

I've looked at the GPX file, and tried reprocessing in several programs but even though the file looks sensible I can't get a better pace. I've messed with a test GPX file and can get a sensible time & pace on that, until I start to use by true GPX data! The XML format is pretty simple and I can't see how a basic file can be so problematic...

I'm not spending anymore time on it; the total distance is added to my total and the crazy pace hasn't upset my PBs. I've raised a query with Strava and we'll see if they come up with anything.

This looks hard...

Chanced upon the V3K but as someone who can't walk along sharp ridges with confidence I can't see doing it with jelly-legs.

Good concept nonetheless.

Strava duplicates

I've now noted a few instances of Strava duplicating an activity that I've uploaded directly from my Garmin watch. They have different titles so it's almost as if GarminSync is running for me in the background...

Over 7 minutes per km!

Unusually the weather forecast has been spot-on for the last 2 days and so the suburbs of Sheffield are under a blanket of snow.

Picturesque Sheffield trees in the snow

Near home it's maybe 100mm deep although in the city there's a mere film of slush. Despite still suffering a sore throat I decided to do the usual saturday run and met up with a much reduced posse (only 1 other) in Endcliffe park. Progress was very slow and I was slowed to a walk up Porter Clough with shortage of breath and burning calf muscles. At Ringinglow the snow was dusty and drifting across the road, piling high against walls. Pretty but a barrier to good progress; striding through up to 500mm will never be easy! Back at the park the 5km parkrun was underway, somewhat surprisingly perhaps, although everyone was slow.

The jog home was more than enough and I count that 14.6km as doubly tough. But that doesn't show on my automated log.

What a change from last Thursday. Fast to tardy in less than 48 hours.

Much improved 1km PB

Now I'm 2 weeks into introducing an interval training run and although I'm sure it is too soon to have had a physiological effect I have a new 1km time. My Strava log had a ridiculous 2m47s time but that was due to a GPS glitch that saw me zig-zag a few hundred metres in zero time. So I cropped that run to make things sensible and repeated my attempt at a Millhouses 1km. That is about the only vaguely flat 1km or so length around home.


The result of a bit of effort was 4m18s (or 4m29s on the Strava 'park 1km segment' as it is a little bit over 1km) which I'm pretty pleased with. At the time of posting I'm #10 on the Leaderboard but that could be lost so easily...