TrailRunner
Tutorial
Connecting
your ForeRunner with your Mac
TrailRunner
is a route planning and journalizing application for long distance sports.
With TrailRunner you catalog, collect and rate your favorite trails for
easy and spontaneous route planning. TrailRunner (trailrunnerx.com)
documents contain digital background maps, way-points, tracks and routes.
Together, tracks and way-points build a network of tracks. Using TrailRunner
you can import workout courses from your Garmin device and automatically
build a personal network of tracks. A route is a concatenated selection
of tracks. You can layout routes manually or let TrailRunner calculate routes
of a given distance for you. If you have rated your tracks with the famous
"iTunes" rating stars, TrailRunner will always try to find routes for you
that have the highest star-rating. This tutorial describes the techniques
and tools you need to successfully utilize the recording features of your
Garmin ForeRunner/Edge, to journalize your workouts in the diary and to
plan new routes and upload those back to the ForeRunner/Edge.
After your workout is completed, connect your ForeRunner/Edge to your Mac and start TrailRunner.
Open
a new Document.
Press the
Import
from GPS Device
toolbar button.
The Helper Application LoadMyTracks will open.
Select Garmin USB and press the Acquire… Button.
LoadMyTracks will now ask you where to store the gpx file it will download from the ForeRunner.
In the save pane, select open file with TrailRunner.
Sidenote: GPX is a common file format to store GPS related Information. It‘s like PDF for GPS receivers.
Note that a preview of the track is displayed in the (yet empty) map.
Merge will eliminate duplicate track paths an Split at lap-points will place way-points at lap-points you set during the workout.
Press the Import button to import the workout and the track.
Please note that a route and a workout is not the same thing. This is because you might use one route on several workouts.
After importing a route accompanied by a workout, the tracks of the route will be merged with any existing tracks and the route itself will be added to the list of routes on the left. The workout information will be stored in the diary instead.
The TrailRunner diary holds your personal history of workout data.
You can customize what columns the diary should show.Also you can view a chart with your Training progress and publish your favorite routes to a .Mac Weblog.
The clipping below shows two problems. First, there is a crossing missing at the left edge and second there are too many crossings at the right edge.
Please note that routes are build of tracks. Several routes can share the same tracks. The orange arrows are crossing points that point into the direction of the next track the route will follow. All tracks utilized by the selected route are hilighted in blue color.
In other words: All tracks in a document build a net of tracks. Routes are sequences of tracks inside this net.
You might want to manually correct any inaccuracies resulting from an import. TrailRunner has tools to help you with that.
To create a new crossing, place a way-point at the crossing. Do this with the way-point tool. Hold the command key down while you click.
TrailRunner will split all underlying tracks at this point. Also TrailRunner will adjust all routes to utilize the new track segments resulting from this operation.
You now might want to remove the redundant track from the net of tracks.
To relocate a point on a track, hold the command key and watch out for the anchor points on the track. Click on an anchor point to select it and command-drag it to a new location.
What you learned so far are the basics to create a net of tracks by importing route after route and supplementing your net of tracks.
After you have a decent net of tracks you can use the calculate route feature of TrailRunner to find new route combinations for a given distance.
One of the other benefits of a ForeRunner or Edge is courses. Courses are predefined routes you can follow with your Virtual Training Partner and are given directions by the gps device itself. To create a course, select or create a new route in TrailRunner and upload it to the gps device.
To create a new route, select a starting way-point in the map.
On the left, the route calculation pane will open. You can now either click on tracks or way-points in the map to manually create a route or you can let TrailRunner automatically find one for you.
Press the Calculate button.
To upload a selected route to your ForeRunner/Edge, press the Send Button in the toolbar (you might have to View > Customize Toolbar) to add the button.
These where the basics tools and techniques you might want to know about TrailRunner. Enjoy
