What you should know first.

1. This is a workaround. A stop-gap until MB builds something to allow the record of non-GPS activities (treadmill, bike trainer, indoor swimming, etc.) to supplement GPS activities.

2. I have not been paid by MB to build this and this is not something that is supported by MB. If you have a problem with anything you should contact me and I will try to fix it, but this is only a side project for me so I can't guarantee anything. CONTACT: email acece@csquared-design.com

3. Activities will not upload themselves to MB, you'll still need to do that. This application simply generates the code to simulate your activity based on basic data you provide. This is a pretty straightforward process, however, if you are uncomfortable with uploading files through the agent this may not be the best solution for you.

4. There are some known issues that I will work on when I have some free time. Two I am aware of are: 1) for time of activity you'll need to enter it in GMT time (I may build something to take into account your time zone); 2) Exact distances for your activity may not be represented in MB. The code generated for your activity is based off of circuits of 100 meters for metric and a 10th of a mile for standard. I've measured these distances as accurately as possible, but due to some interpolations that occur in MB, some rounding occurs with the data and this is often reflected in your activity distance. The accuracy is pretty close however, and about as good as my GPS device, so I'm happy with my results. Your results/satisfaction may vary—particularly because the margin of error can be greater depending on your location in the world. If there is sufficient demand and MB takes longer than expected to offer its own support of non-GPS activities I may put in some more work to make these measurements better.

5. Is it possible to create an activity that MB doesn't accept? Yes, try to submit an activity where you traveled a hundred meters in 2 hours, or a hundred kilometers in 2 minutes and chances are the Agent will reject your activity as the trackpoint info won't make much sense. If I were working on this project full time I might try to code against a user doing this, but as I'm not, and most reasonable activities should be accepted, I'm just releasing this with the assumption you are actually trying to get an actual activity posted to your digest. If this is the case you shouldn't have too many problems.

PLEASE NOTE: If you are having difficulty submitting your activity from your inbox, check and see if you have your preferences set to automatically use MB corrections and MB Gravity (which aren't really useful in this instance anyway). In most cases this will not cause a problem, but for those that do, shutting this preference off should solve it. Water activities seem especially susceptible to these problems.
Equipment Tracking?

Looking for a shoe tracker, or interested in tracking other equipment? Here's another MB work around.

  1. Place the name of your equipment in the comment field of your activity.
  2. In your digest view, select "Show Advanced Filters."
  3. Select "Comments" and "Contains" from the pull-down menus and type in your equipment name and then click "Add."
  4. You'll see a report for all activities containing the equipment name in the comments field. You can further refine this by adding date ranges, sports, etc.
  5. Like what you see? Save the report for easy access later.

This tip was thought of by Paul Pettit (paulnz on MB) I believe.

Set up account
Why should I set up an account?
Setting up an account here will save you some time as you will be able to store your HR zones and base GPS location, and if I get ambitious, allow you set additional preferences.

If you'd rather not do this, you can still use this application, but you'll have to manually enter your information each time if you don't want to use my default values. To create your file without logging in, please select from the options below:

Metric

Standard