So I had some free time over Columbus Day weekend and figured why not spend it on a fun programming project. My politically-incorrectly named GhettoTCX project emerged after some quick fussing around with TCX (XML) file.

Ghetto TCX

GhettoTCX will parse a TCX file from Garmin, MapMyRide, etc. and generate some basic plots. The most interesting plot type is the heart rate zone chart. It can create a panel of plots, by parsing all the filed in a given directory.

It’s called GhettoTCX because it’s a no-frills, nothing fancy, not even a true TCX file parser. It simply searches for some keywords and pulls out heartbeat info and lat/long data. And not even at the same time, you need to the read the file twice if you want to plot both.

The example code and python code repository can be found on the project’s github page.

There are “better” TCX/XML file parsers out there. This one was meant to do one thing (actually two things), quickly and easily: plot heart rate (and heart rate zones). It can also plot lat/long data points onto a scatterplot, but it is seriously no-frills when you can get nice google maps charts on MapMyRide and practically any other fitness app out there.

It started out (and ended) as a fun weekend programming project… if you are curious about your heart rate zone, and are too cheap cost-conscious to pay the monthly subscription fee to MapMyRide for the heart rate zone chart, you can use this free tool instead. Enjoy!