Open a hiking .fit file — long duration, elevation and battery gaps
A hike is a .fit file recorded to last all day, and the compromises that make the battery survive change what the track and distance can tell you.
Open your file
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a .fit file from a watch or bike computer
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Low-power GPS thins the track
To survive a long day, a watch often drops into a battery-saving GPS mode on a hike — recording a fix every minute or two instead of every second. The track then cuts corners on switchbacks and reads a little short, because a straight line between sparse fixes skips the wiggles you actually walked. That is a power setting doing its job, not a broken sensor, and it is why a hike’s distance can undercount where a continuously-tracked trail run would not.
Elevation is the number that matters, and it is barometric
On a hike the climb is often the point, and like a trail run it usually comes from a barometric altimeter rather than GPS. It is stable but weather-sensitive, and it is a different measurement from a map’s terrain-derived gain. Long duration also means more pressure drift, so a multi-hour hike’s total climb carries more of that slow error than a short activity.
What you get from this page
This page opens your hike on your device and shows the recording cadence of the GPS fixes, the barometric elevation, and the full field inventory — so a coarse track reads as a power setting and a big climb reads as barometric, not as errors.
In the corpus this tool is tested against, 143 activities resolved to this sport. See the full activity-type list for every sport a .fit file can declare, and open any .fit file whatever its sport.