Moving from Ascent to rubiTrack

Last updated on July 29, 2013

Since getting a GPS-based cycling computer and finding that Garmin’s offline analysis software, Training Center, is a bit lacking I’ve been using Ascent to log and aggregate my ride data. Ascent is okay, has some bugs, and seems to work but is otherwise abandoned. It also doesn’t work on the forthcoming OS X Mavericks, which means I need to find some other way to do offline ride analysis.

I enjoy tools such as Strava (and to some degree Garmin Connect), but I don’t like the idea of keeping my ride data on someone else’s system without an easy way to export it. Sure, I could back up the FIT files (raw files from the GPS unit), but that doesn’t include post-ride metadata that I’d add like the a name and general description of the route, or notes about the ride itself.

Stereo from the Reddit /r/bicycling IRC channel pointed me to rubiTrack, whose version 3 seems like it’ll be a good replacement for Ascent. There’s some claims of bugginess, and it’s lacking some features that Ascent had (eg: equipment maintenance log), but it otherwise seems good and is actively being developed. I’ve now switched over to it, so I wanted to give some details as to what it took to move my data over.

Here’s what I did:

1. Buy rubiTrack, install the license.
2. Launch Ascent.
3. Show each activity as a separate row. (At the top of the Ascent window click the gear button and hold, then select Browser View, All Activities. Alternately, press Option-A / ⌥A.)
4. Select a range of activities, perhaps a year at a time. Attempting to export too many at once will result in Ascent crashing.
5. Right click in the Activity Browser (on the highlighted events) and select Export as tcx…. Give the export file an appropriate name.
6. Repeat selection and export until all activities are exported.
7. Quit Ascent.
8. Launch rubiTrack, create a new set of data.
9. Import each TCX file one at a time. Note that importing takes a while, and the rubiTrack UI doesn’t look like it is doing anything during the first import; be patient. During the subsequent imports an animation will display next to the Latest Import section.
10. After importing, some of your activities may be listed as something other than Biking. By selecting multiple entries, right-clicking and picking Edit… you can change multiple activities to Biking all at once.
11. Unfortunately, the TCX exports won’t contain either the name or equipment, so each activity will need to be edited to note these. Instead of a name, rubiTrack supports both a Location and Route, where Route (if present) is a subset of the location. For example, Stony Creek Metropark could have routes such as 6/12 Hour Race, Group Ride + Bonus, etc. Before beginning the renaming, go into Preferences and uncheck the Set similar locations automatically option in the General tab. Setting this automatically renames other activities in the same geographic area, which doesn’t work well if one regularly rides in a given area. Note that the options Import Category as: and Import “Name” as route on the Import tab do not help get names when importing from Ascent-exported TCX files.
12. In Customize, Activity Types, Manage… delete other activities as needed so that only Biking, Racing, and Trainer exist with colors being Green, Blue, and Red, respectively. Set Biking to the default. Find appropriate icons in …/rubiTrack 3.app/Contents/Resources/ as atb_*.png. (Other people may want to keep these, but I wanted to reduce clutter… I can always add other activities if I decide to track them.)
13. Define Heart Rate Zones as appropriate. More info on my HR zones can be found in this post, and I colored the zones the same as the LW Coaching chart.
14. Define equipment via Window, Equipment. This, unfortunately, is not as useful as Ascent’s equipment log in that it can’t serve as a maintenance log. I have one entry for each bike and the trainer, with each bike or bike+trainer used with each activity. I may replace the maintenance log with a spreadsheet.
15. Edit entries one at a time to have an appropriate location and activity type. Most of my Locations were copied from Ascent’s Title field. Autocomplete and the ability to select multiple entries at once and edit them en masse made this go quickly.
16. Rides starting from home were tagged From Home and those which are part of certain group rides are tagged CRAMBA-IMBA Group Ride.
17. After editing entries, the left side bar which groups rides by Location can be used to refine the listed locations. For example, I may have interchangeably used CRPT and Clinton River Park Trails, or RB and River Bends, depending on the ride. With a comprehensive listing of all locations used its easy to refine these for greater consistency.
18. Play with the Options… on a given ride, in particular the Original device data and Use speed and distance data from device in chart options. Currently, with my Edge 500 and 510 data, this is a bit problematic. With Original device data checked the distance seems to reflect the distance that the unit showed (from the wheel sensor), but the Total Duration and Active Duration match and are short. Without this checked the Total Duration and Active Duration vary appropriately, illustrating the amount of time stopped, but the distance seems to be based on GPS and thus under recorded. This has been reported here and I hope that it’s fixed soon.

Other than the issue mentioned in #18, I’m pretty happy with rubiTrack. I’m particularly fond of its use of OpenStreetMap data, as this means that the trails that I’ve mapped in OSM (eg: Addison Oaks) have their routes right in my preferred analysis software. This is probably going to make me map even more stuff…

It’s also great for viewing things like heart rate data, where stops were made, high elevation points along the way, and also comparing rides. The author seems actively engaged in making it better, it should work with 10.9, is much faster to save, and is much nicer for answering questions like “How many races have I done in X year?” or “How many times did I ride at Stony Creek?”.