Connecting the Dots - Garmin Watch to AGOL

For Christmas, my wife bought me a Garmin Forerunner 35 to assist with my training leading up to Grandma's Marathon in Duluth this summer. So far, I've really enjoyed everything the Forerunner 35 has to offer and I've been pleasantly surprised with how quickly it syncs to mobile devices.

Since I also now have a personal AGOL license, I wanted to play around with uploading some of my watch data and creating a web map to catalog my training routes.  The Garmin Connect App already does this (and much more), but I wanted an excuse to play around in AGOL.

After downloading a recent .gpx file from the Garmin Connect website, I was able to use the GPX to Features tool to bring these feature points into ArcMap.

GPX to Features Tool

Output points from the .gpx file

While the points are interesting visually, my primary goal was to save these routes as line features.  To accomplish this, the Points to Line tool enabled me to connect these points (which have a Date/Time field) chronologically to create a continuous route line.

Points to Line tool, with Date/Time as the sort field

Output line after running the Points to Line tool

So, there you have it, a relatively simple set of procedures to get .gpx data off of a running watch and into ArcMap!  I loaded the data into an AGOL test map, which can be found on the Running tab of this blog, for those interested in seeing the results! More routes to come!