Garmin marathon schedules and macs

Hello folks,

I have managed to download my training plan and am 3 days into my marathon training. (doing the local Brathay run in May)  

Question.

is it possible to save my training runs into the workouts callendar or are the two pages only available sepparately?

Cheers

S1eepless.

davepoole wrote (see)

Hi All,

My first post to these forums so figured I should make it a helpful one! I'm 38 and been running for 18 months. I've decided that I'll be running my first marathon this year and am using the Garmin schedules for my training. On to week two for a sub 3.30 time and going well so far

I use my forerunner 305 with two Macs - a PowerMac G5 and a Macbook Pro - working perfectly with both under OS X 10.5.

It is possible to convert the .wkt file on the RW website to the XML format (.tcx) used by the Mac version of the training software. You will need a USB stick and a friend with a PC running the latest version of Training Centre for windows. You simply need to import the workouts into the PC software which will then allow you to export them as a .tcx file. Put this onto the USB stick and import it into training centre on your Mac. Job done!

Hope this helps.

Dave

 Sounds like the perfect solution and one that should be easy for RW to do in house and then offer Mac compatible .tcx downloads as well as the PC compatible .wkt files.

 Al.

Yes, it sounded good, but I tried it, and downloaded the 3:45 pace version, with the correct marathon  date, and the two May dates suggested earlier in the forum, 13 and 15 May, but none of these could convince TrainingCenter, on the borrowed PC, to put runs on their correct dates. So there seemed no point in importing any of these into my Mac's version of TrainingCenter.

I inclined to give up, week 4 starts tomorrow and I'd rather spend time training than faffing about. 

Not really a solution to the schedule problem (sorry), but I tried Garmin Training Centre on the Mac after waiting eagerly for its release for months but I didn't get on with it. Mainly because it didn't work with my 201.

I accidentally found a bit of software called "TrailRunnerX" which looks like it started out as a route planner for runners and cyclists, but now seems to have evolved into a proper running log with a diary, pace calculations, etc. I've not tried it with any schedules (the 201 is a bit too old for that) but it fits my needs.

The author seems like a nice guy too, and always answers questions and fixes bugs. I've got no connection with the application other than I like it.

Ascent from Montebello Software is a good alternative too.

Al. 

Hmmm, that "Ascent" looks pretty good... A bit more geeky than TrailRunner - perfect!

Maybe I missed it on their web pages, but I can't see that Ascent allows one to schedule activities for the future, in the way that Garmin TC does? Can anyone confirm/deny please?

That's a sine qua non for me, at least....otherwise how could one import the RW Garmin schedules with their correct dates?

You're right, you can't (AFAIK) shcedule future activites and upload them to the Forerunner using Ascent... It is more a journal of what you have done. Of course, you can do this with the GTC which is free software so I guess there is no reason why you couldn't use GTC for that purpose but Ascent for analysing you performance afterwards.

Note: I've only just purchased Ascent myself so I'm just getting to grips with it, so I could be wrong!

 Al.

You may like to read a Mac Training Software Review that I've just written about my thoughts on the various Mac based training journals I've been trying out.... I guess I should have explored the online options a little better as well though.

 Al. 

I think I may have found out how to convert the WKT files to work on a Mac. Being a programmer I studied the WKT and tcx file format differences and with a bit of playing around worked out the differences. Theres extra markup in the WKT file and each workout needs to have a name attribute, but wth these changes the workouts section can be lifted out of the WKT and placed into the tcx file.So the following steps will convert it. I will put together a script to do this automatically

1. export from Garmin software, this creates a .tcx file
2. copy  <Workouts>...</Workouts> section from  the WKT file you downloaded from Runners World
3. paste this into the tcx file, replacing the existing <Workouts>...</Workouts>
4. delete '<Running Name="Running"><Folder Name="Runner's World">'
5. global search and replace '<Workout>' with '<Workout Sport="Running">'
6. search for '</Folder>' and delete that line
7. search for '</Running>' and delete that line
8. search for '<Biking Name="Biking"/>' and delete that line
9. search for '<Other Name="Other"/>' and delete that line
10. save the file, then import it back into Garmin application

I will try to knock up a perl script to be able to convert WKT files to tcx, should have something to do that in a day or two. Just got my 305 tonight, spent 3 hours figuring this out, now 2:27 and I'm up fing 5 miles later this morning...doh

The following perl script will convert the WKT file. save the file on your Mac as wkt2tcx.pl then chmod a+x wkt2tcx.pl so it can execute then run as

wkt2tcx.pl rwschedule.wkt > rwschedule.tcx

then you'll be able to load that file into the Garmin application (NOTE replace the smiley with : then s if I put those 2 characters side by side I get ) If people are still have trouble I wll convert your wkt files but it may take a day or so for me to turn these round.

#!/usr/bin/perl
my $file = shift or die "$0 WKTFILE\n\n";
local( *FH ) ;
open( FH, $file ) or die "cannot open $file because $!\n";
my $text = do { local( $/ ) ; <FH> } ;

# find workouts from WKT file
$start = index  $text, '<Workouts>';
$end = index  $text, '</Workouts>';
$end += length '</Workouts>';
my $workouts = substr $text, $start, ($end - $start);

# add Sport attribute to Workout
$workouts =~ s/<Workout>/<Workout Sport="Running">/g;

# Remove elements which break the format
$workouts =~ s!<Biking Name="Biking"/>!!g;
$workouts =~ s!<Other Name="Other"/>!!g;
$workouts =~ s!</Folder>!!g;
$workouts =~ s!<Running Name="Running">!!g;
$workouts =~ s!<Folder Name="Runner's World">!!g;
$workouts =~ s!</Running>!!g;

# create output, use tcx header
print q(<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no" ?>
<TrainingCenterDatabase xmlns="http://www.garmin.com/xmlschemas/TrainingCenterDatabase/v2"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsichemaLocation="http://www.garmin.com/xmlschemas/TrainingCenterDatabase/v2
http://www.garmin.com/xmlschemas/TrainingCenterDatabasev2.xsd">);
print "$workouts";
print "</TrainingCenterDatabase>";

Eh?

I'm not very technical but am having problems downloading the training programs onto my mac.  Can anyone explain it in language that a 3 year old might understand?

Cheers. 

Ok I'll try to put something together., tapering for FLM on Sunday so I should have no excuses to put something together. Alternatively I can convert one for you, just let me know the details and I can post a link to where you can get it. It is a bit of a pain converting if you are not familar with scripting languages.

cheers.

Spartacles,

Thanks for the kind words, and I'm actually from Glasgow, I abandoned my hometown searching warmer climbs. I'll be sporting my Irn Bru running vest on Sunday and milk bottle tan

RW did contact me about my post but I've not heard from there techie guys who do the website. I use different programming languages so can't directly help them but I could talk them through my non  Fisher-Price instructions.

I'll post on the list where you can download the schedule. Should be in the next few days.

Barry 

Spartacles,

Get your schedule all set for 19 Oct Amsterdam marathon. Download via ftp.

Run the terminal application at the command prompt type the following (username and password are garmin), once downloaded import into garmin software. let me know how you get on, I have tested the script imports ok into the garmin software.

ftp ftp.servage.net

garmin

garmin 

get amsterdam_sub4.tcx

Here's how it should look. 

bash-3.2$ ftp ftp.servage.net
Trying 77.232.67.28...
Connected to ftp.servage.net.
220 Servage.net FTP Server #3
Name (ftp.servage.net:barrypretsell): garmin
331 Password required for garmin.
Password:
230 User garmin logged in.
Remote system type is UNIX.
Using binary mode to transfer files.
ftp> ls
229 Entering Extended Passive Mode (|||49841|)
150 Opening ASCII mode data connection for file list
drwxr-xr-x   2 garmin   (?)          4096 Apr 10 21:46 .
drwxr-xr-x   2 garmin   (?)          4096 Apr 10 21:46 ..
-rw-r--r--   1 garmin   (?)         60235 Apr 10 21:46 amsterdam_sub4.tcx
226 Transfer complete.
ftp> get amsterdam_sub4.tcx
local: amsterdam_sub4.tcx remote: amsterdam_sub4.tcx
229 Entering Extended Passive Mode (|||53910|)
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for amsterdam_sub4.tcx (60235 bytes)
100% |********************************************************************************************************************************| 60235      61.63 KB/s    00:00 ETA
226 Transfer complete.
60235 bytes received in 00:01 (58.23 KB/s)
ftp>