Getting Multisport workouts from Apple Watch into Strava

Having just completed my first triathlon I was keen to dive into the stats and see how I’d performed compared to all my training. Imagine my disappointment when all I got was this:

TL;DR: Skip to the bottom if you would just like the step by step instructions.

Not having recorded a multisport event on my Apple Watch before I had naively assumed that it would automatically breakdown the workout into the three individual disciplines when I imported it into Strava. I’d seen this happen for other people I follow on Strava who use non Apple devices and had assumed it would be the same.

To be fair, you do get the three individual disciplines in Apple Fitness but I like to use Strava and was keen to get the data in there. Some quick Google searches showed that there are a few apps you can buy that will do this for you. As this is likely to be the only tri I do, I didn’t really want to fork out for an app, and being a developer my instinct was to look into doing it myself. That led me into a whole morning of pain and to this article being written which will hopefully spare someone else from the same fate.

I’m not an Apple developer and building an iOS app wasn’t a viable option, so I did some Google searches on exporting workout data from Apple Fitness. Turns out this is fairly straight forward, although it’s from Apple Health not Fitness. Here’s how:

1. Open the Health App on your phone.
2. Make sure you are on the Summary screen and tap your profile image at the top right.
3. Scroll to the bottom and click Export All Health Data.
   You’ll then have to wait while the data is prepared which might take a little while, depending on how much data you have.
4. Save the data to your favourite cloud service.

What you end up with is a file called export.zip and this could be quite a beast if you have been recording health data for some time. I’ve had my watch for a few years and my zip file was 122.5MB.

Opening this file you’ll have a folder called “apple_health_export” and in there will be two xml files and two more folders. Having worked with XML a lot in the past my first thought was that I could easily write some code to read the files and manipulate the data into whatever format I needed to get into Strava. However, these xml files are massive — for me they were 1.26GB and 500MB — and working with them is a pain.

To cut a long story short, after some time playing around I realised that one of the folders — workout-routes — contained gpx files and that gpx files are a supported import format for Strava. There is a gpx file in the folder for each of your workouts and handily there is a separate gpx file for each discipline of the multisport workout, including separate ones for the transitions in the triathlon. The files are named by date so your specific workouts are easy to find. For my triathlon I had five files, one each for swim, bike and run and 2 for the transitions. The file names include the start time for that workout so it’s easy to tell which is which. Note the time is in UTC format so may not be the exact time you are expecting.

To import these files into Strava you need to login to the Strava website, then click the “+” icon at the top right to upload an activity. Click “File” from the links on the left and then the “Choose Files” button to browse for your gpx file. You’ll need to have extracted the relevant gpx files from the zip and you can then choose the files one at a time to import.

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Voila — you now have your workout data for each discipline of your multisport workout as a separate workout in Strava, so you can dive into your stats, check your personal bests, see your segment times and compare your performance against your friends.

There is a caveat — this method only imports the route related data, you do not get your heart rate data. Still, it’s far more useful than just having your overall time and calories burned.

Step by step instructions for importing Apple Watch multisport workouts into Strava.

On your iPhone:

1. Open the Health App.
2. Make sure you are on the Summary screen and tap your profile image at the top right.
3. Scroll to the bottom and click “Export All Health Data”.
4. Save the file to your favourite cloud service.

On your desktop/laptop:

1. Browse to the exported zip file from your cloud service. The file is called export.zip.
2. Navigate to “apple_health_export\workout-routes”.
3. Find the gpx files relating to your multisport workout using the dates in the filenames. You will have one for each discipline in the workout and one for each transition.
4. Copy these files out of the zip into a folder on your computer or the cloud.
5. Login to the Strava website in your browser.
6. Click the “+” icon at the top right, or hover the icon and click “Upload activity”.
7. In the links on the left select “File”.
8. Click the “Choose Files” button and browse to the location to which you extracted your gpx files and choose the first file to import.
9. Add the details of the workout and save.
10. Repeat from point 6 above for each discipline you wish to import.