Many of you head out with a watch on your wrist. The outing gets recorded, often better than with a phone in a pocket. Until now you had to retype it into MushMate by hand: distance, duration, elevation — and the track stayed in the watch.
What changes for you
In the manual entry of a session, on the computer as on the phone, there is a new button: "Prefill from a GPX file".
- Export the outing as GPX from your watch's website. For Garmin, that is connect.garmin.com: the Garmin Connect phone app exports no file, but the website also works in the phone's browser.
- In MushMate, open the manual entry and pick the file.
- Date, distance, moving time and elevation fill in. Distance and moving time are the file's own: they can't be edited (see below why). Choose your dogs and the surface as usual, then save.
The session counts in your dogs' load like any other, and it keeps its track: you find it in Traces with its map, labelled "GPX file", with its real total time and its stops — where, and for how long. On the phone, the per-kilometre splits can also be read "moving only", stops removed.
If a session on the same day has almost the same distance, a warning asks you to check it isn't the same outing. It blocks nothing: you decide.
What others see, and what they never see
Your kennel members see the session and its track, as for any other session. The file itself never leaves your device: it is read in the browser or on the phone, and only the session and its track are saved.
What this feature does not do
- No automatic sync with Garmin. Garmin reserves its access to companies it approves. We prefer a simple gesture that works today to a promise that depends on a third party.
- No heart rate or cadence. Those are your measurements, and your dogs' load model does not use them. The GPX file is enough.
- No guessed surface. See below.
- No correcting the distance or the moving time: they are the file's. The date, elevation, dogs and surface can be corrected before you save, not after.
- No invented path. If the watch lost its signal while moving, MushMate draws nothing between the two points it recorded.
- One file per outing, as you go.
If your watch already syncs with Strava, MushMate's Strava import remains available: it brings the session and its track, both visible to you only.
Four choices made against the obvious
The session is not labelled "Garmin". It is labelled "GPX file", because a Suunto or Coros watch, or an app like Topo GPS, produces exactly the same file. We did not want a label that is wrong half the time.
Moving time comes from our rule, not the watch's. An interval between two points counts when it moves at 1 km/h or more. On a three-hour ski-touring outing with the dogs, with five stops longer than five minutes including one of nearly half an hour, it gives 1 h 21 min 51 s moving. You can't correct it, and that is deliberate: the outing's stops come from the same rule, and a moving time edited by hand would make the page show two different "stopped" times. If your watch reports another moving time, it simply counts differently.
We do not guess the surface. We had planned to propose it from the activity type the watch records. A musher's files changed our mind: a summer hike and a ski outing with the dogs carried the same type, "hiking". A watch has no "dog team" profile; a guessed surface would often be wrong. You choose it, as usual.
Everything that is not movement is a stop, however short. We could have kept only stops of a minute or more: the list would be shorter. But the page would then show two different "stopped" times side by side. With this rule, moving time and stopped time always add up to the outing's total duration.