download fit file from web link?

1231905 7 months ago

Good afternoon,

I am a physics professor and am working with a student on her honor's project. She wants to collect Garmin data from participants in a local 5K so that she can analyze differences in performance.

Other users can share data from events on their news feed via weblink, and these weblinks provide the detailed data. However, that data is not easily accessible for our purposes. We really need the FIT files to get the spreadsheet that contains all of the data. As of now, I think the only way to get those FIT files is to have the user open their Garmin account, download the FIT file for an event, and email that file to us. Since we are gathering data at the site of the 5K, I fear that users will not be able to go through this many steps even if they are willing to share their data with us.

Is there a way to download the FIT files from these shared web links?

Garmin, can we get a link to the original FIT file on the pages connected via these weblinks?

Thanks

Chad

0 flocsy🤠 10 days ago in reply to FlowState

The use of Garmin is free of charge, but there's one advantage of Strava: almost all runners will have some watch and they can all sync to Strava, not only those that use Garmin, so for a research it's a better place.

0 FlowState 10 days ago in reply to flocsy🤠

flocsy🤠 said:
The use of Garmin is free of charge, but there's one advantage of Strava: almost all runners will have some watch and they can all sync to Strava, not only those that use Garmin, so for a research it's a better place.

Yes, that advantage of Strava applies in general (especially since many casual runners are switching to Apple Watch or never used Garmin in the first place) but OP specifically mentioned *Garmin* data and FIT files, meaning there’s implicitly no issue with excluding non-Garmin users.

So that raises the question: assuming that an app was created to grab data from the Strava API, why wouldn’t an app that uses the Garmin API have worked just as well? Was there some reason that the Strava API was preferred?

I’ve def seen complaints from devs about difficulty working with the Garmin API. I haven’t tried either API, so I don’t have any first hand experience either way.

Or maybe, as you implied, the data was literally scraped from activities that were simply shared normally via Strava. This goes back to the question of why something similar wouldn’t also be possible with Connect. Looking at network responses for someone else’s Strava activity vs my own public Garmin activity, it seems that Garmin might actually provide more scrapeable data than Strava, in the regular activity view. (Garmin definitely displays more information than Strava.)

So I’m kinda curious about what was actually done here.