I've been planning a few training rides recently and also some weekend trips like the one a couple of weekends ago, down to the New Forest and back.
My Garmin Forerunner 310XT has a very basic capability to follow a pre planned route via a kind of breadcrumb trail. It doesn't give you a map of the surrounding area but it does give you the route and direction to take.
It looks like this:
I normally set the zoom to 300ft or 0.3km to make it clear enough to follow.
Garmin give you the means to upload a route to the device by planning it turn by turn on the Garmin Connect website. This just wasn't going to work for me so I've found a really good system.
The way I've been doing it has planned local cycle rides and sportive routes plus more importantly it's generated routes for long distant bike rides. Last year I made routes for a 3 day Swansea to London ride and a 4 day Edinburgh to London challenge.
All the routes have been relatively quick to make and have followed the most amazing quiet, safe cycling roads, faultlessly for thousands of miles over the last year.
Here's how to do it.
If you have a newer Garmin you can skip many of the later steps and just put the route file into your New folder on the Garmin or it's memory card.
You will need a free account at Strava.com.
You will need a Garmin Connect account and Garmin Express.
You will need a free account at Gpsies.com.
1. The point to point route is created in Strava's brilliant route builder application on their website. This uses Strava's heatmaps to work out which roads are most popular with cyclists, then uses those roads in preference when building your route.
I've been routed down exquisitely beautiful, smooth tarmacked, tiny farmer's lanes which would never have come up on traditional map planning, let alone knowing whether the surface was suitable for your road tyres.
You can also select 'minimum elevation' to avoid the hills if that's what you want. As Strava routes you down the popular cycle ways you can be sure that if there's a hill on route, you'll be going over it!
2. Export the route. For the 310XT you need to export as TCX. If you have a newer device that may be all you need to do, then copy the route file to your New folder on your device.
3. Import the file into Gpsies.com.
4. Export the route, download the gpx track from Gpsies.com. This re plots the course and makes it acceptable for upload to Garmin Connect.
5. Upload gpx track to Garmin connect under 'upload activites'.
6. Click on 'save as course'. If you right click on this and open in a new tab it will be easier to complete the next step.
7. Delete the track you just uploaded, hopefully it's in the previous tab otherwise you'll have to search for it in your activities. Mine are always buried around the year 2000 somewhere!
If you don't delete the original track Garmin won't send the course to your device for some reason. It has cost me many, many hours of frustration to work this out!!
8. Go back to the course you saved and click send to device. Select your Garmin 310XT. It should then sync across via Garmin Express.
9. On your 310XT go to Training/Courses and your new course should be in there. Select Do Course and off you go!
Don't wander too far off course because the map will disappear entirely until you find your way back. Garmin will then tell you Course Found! As if it has found it for you... Hmmm!
Very rarely there may be a problem with the course which can be resolved by setting the speed and time values to zero when creating or editing the course.
That's it. Seems very convoluted but it's definitely worth it. The best cycle routes I've done have been created this way. Enjoy :)
