Recently my neighbour convinced me to do a half-marathon in December. Reason enough to analyze the collected data of my workouts. Whenever I did sports in the last couple of years I tried to track my performance using my mobile and the Endomondo-App. This year at the JMP Discovery Summit in Brussles I already played around with the collected data during Dick de Veaux talk:
My running statistics show a significant drop in mean speed :-/ #jmpcon (1/2) @Dick de Veaux pic.twitter.com/IuTDS4gxFu
— Basti Hoffmeister (@neuhier_) 24. März 2015
Then I discovered that there is actually way more data available than just distance, time and date for each workout. Endomondo - like most other sports-apps - saves all your workout data (including GPS-tracking) in a XML-like format called .tcx. The homepage https://tapiriik.com/ helps you to download all your data, e.g. to your dropbox. Just sign in with your sports-app- and your dropbox-account and it will start synchronizing, that being downloading the data to your dropbox.
Now I got a bunch of .tcx-files - one for each workout - and no idea how to get them into JMP. My first try was to use the XML-import-addin but sadly it did not allow to import multiple files at once (I have about 120 workouts = files) and somehow it did not catch the whole GPS-data from the files.
Thus I wrote a small script to import all .tcx-files that are stored in one folder. The script is available here! Just run the script, provide the right folder and wait. For my round about 120 workouts it took roughly 10 minutes. Of course there is a lot to do if you want to import all the GPS-data.
Finally you should get two new data tables.
The first table gives an summary of all individual workouts (Date, Type of sport, Distance, Time). The other, larger dataset will additionally give you all the GPS-data (longitude, latitude and altitutde) for your workouts. Using this data I learned:
... that I should probably train for longer distances. Remember a half-marathon is 21,0975 km.
... that I am at least focussing on the right type of sports: Most of the times I go for a run!
... and of course that I can use the GPS-data for funny vizualisations!
That's it for today! Keep running and see you next time!