Does anyone/everyone else hate that damned site? It is always dog slow, and lately it won’t display any of my other data - hr, elevation, timing, cadence, etc… anything better out there? I use BIMactive, too but the garmin site does have a few advantages, if it worked.
I have problems with everything that is based in flash. Try to restart your browser or computer. And make sure you are using updated flash. For me it loads better in IE although I normally use Chrome.
I fully agree, which is why I don’t use it. I’m a big fan of Sport Tracks, which has a Garmin plug in. Lots of good features, very robust tools, and my favourite price.
Garmin Connect is absolute garbage. Use your HRM on the trainer? Tough! There’s not any way to even input the ride distance. C’mon Garmin, that is just basic functionality.
Gotta agree that SportTracks is exceptional. Especially like some of the available Plug-ins that help estimate Power, Training Load, etc.
Garmin Connect is the most useless thing, definitely try Sporttracks, much better. Check out the training load plugin for Sporttracks, pretty cool tool.
sporttracks is the only really decent alternative to me. I don’t have a problem with most of garmin connect but i’m not trying to change my workout numbers 
I do hope that they keep adding to it. The flash based site is not very easy to use. But if you look at training center you’ll appreciate connect quite a lot.
Sporttracks!!!
How do you upload to Sportracks with a 310?
You use the 405 garmin api. Works great. It is now a two step process though vs. the 305 since you first have to download from the 310 to the computer via ant agent… then from ant agent to sporttracks.
Chunks is my dog’s name.
ya, i upload to both because I’m scared of losing my data… When that happens I feel like I lost my workout!
I tried it a couple times and never got it to upload. It would just hang. I tried re-installing the plug-in a couple time, no go.
I wish they would update the mapping in the regular software (which is dog slow to start also).
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make sure you are installing as administrator if you are using windows vista.
No Vista, just a nice stable XP laptop. It gets partway through the upload and just stops.
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Downloading into SportTracks using the Garmin Communicator option in the devices list works well with the 310XT. I can only do this on the PC as the ANT Agent is not working through Parallels on the Mac.
SportTracks is probably the lowest cost Windoze route for data logging, and really the only reason I run Windoze on the Macs. We’ve only ever used Garmin Training Centre as a back up for data and generation of workouts. Had a look at Garmin Communicator when we moved to the 310XT and found it less than workable. RunSaturday.com is heading the right way for a web app in place if Garmin Communicator.
That’s ironic to me, because they tried to be nice standards-friendly guys. They implemented the first go-round (back when it was MotionBased) with SVG, since at least that had an open, published standard. Everyone hated it. So grumbling back to Flash they went.
Disclaimer: I know the guys that started it.
I never used motion based but I am not thrilled with flash. Obviously that is more adobe’s fault than Garmin’s. The new (if you can still call it that) facebook doesn’t load well either.
Yeah, the SVG plugin was worse than flash, so you wouldn’t have liked that any better. There just aren’t good alternatives for some things.
I agree with you that flash blows, though. Not a fan of the new facebook, or the new cyclingnews.
Yeah, motionbased really wasn’t that bad, even with its glitches. I even was happy paying my $11/month to help support them at the time. I could compare performances from earlier events, determine splits, and everything else I needed to. Connect now is horrible, and when they migrated the data from motionbased over, they lost 80% of my session notes and naming. So 80% of my historical data just says “untitled”… Great.
So I too looked for an alternative, and came across SportTracks. The importing works 100% of the time first shot, and over all its pretty damn good. I even went back to motionbased and exported all of my workouts as .HST files (so it had GPS, HR, notes, etc) and imported it right into SportTracks.
So moving forward, I’m shifting to SportTracks as I no longer trust Garmin with my training history.
I use Garmin Connect with Firefox, it seems to have problems with Safari. I also tried Ascent which is not bad. I also am trying Training Peaks, but I have to load the data into Garmin Connect first and then export as .tcx and upload into TP. Sport Tracks looks very good, but does not run on Macs so thats out. I don’t want to run any kind of Windows.