Proving rides carried out

[Ned Kelly]

Hi

I was wondering how you manage to provide evidence for a long ride...unfortunately I'm better at turning peddles, than technology!

On normal rides I use Strava or Garmin 810 to log my activity but neither devices will get me past 12 hours. I have entered for the group start of Braunton 150. I will be using my old Garmin eTrex Vista HCx as my navigation tool, but does anyone know if that can be used to log the activity as well?..to prove that I didn't just spend the whole weekend in a Wetherspoons in Minehead.

Many thanks for any advice

[whitestone]

I had a similar issue when I started doing longer rides and was using a Garmin 510. The cheapest (and probably easiest) is to save what you've done fairly regularly so every eight hours or whatever time might be convenient such as at a cafe stop or bivy. You then use a site like fitfiletools.com to "stitch" them together before you upload to Strava to give one ride. You can either stitch a day's worth of files together or the whole ride. I tend to use the latter for events that require a single bivy but day by day for longer rides.

The general sequence is:

Plug GPS device into your computer
The device will appear as another drive in Explorer (on a PC) or Finder (on a Mac)
Copy the .fit files from the GPS to somewhere on your computer
Now go to fitfiletools.com and choose the option to combine files
Follow instructions and you'll end up with one big activity file. Save this to your computer

You can now use that file as "evidence" if someone wants it or upload it to Strava using the "upload file" mechanism.

[Ned Kelly]

Thanks Whitestone,

That actually seems to make sense to me!...I'll give that a go on a few practice activities

[Dyffers]

Your Garmin eTrex Vista HCx will last at least 24 hours on a pair of AAs, then just swap them out for another set. It will log your ride by default. Check you haven't stopped it doing so in the options, but it will automatically create a gpx file, and possibly a few gpx files if a multiple day ride

[whitestone]

Forgot to say: the Edge series are aimed at road riding, some people have noted problems with them "failing" after a length of time. This is possibly due to an internal limit on the number of data points in a single ride/file and seems to happen around the 12-16hr mark. I've not had this problem with the 510 though. Save a ride before you get to that point and start a new one then stitch them together afterwards.

[Richard G]

My Edge 1000 has done 22 hours, but obviously with the assistance of a battery.

[ianfitz]

There's also those tiny I-got-U gpx recorders which are tiny and will record non stop for about 3 days.

They were very cheaply available a couple of years back.

No screen. Just a button to switch it on. When the blue light is blinking then it's recording.

[Richard G]

Neat little idea for a backup.