Field notes 4 MIN READ
Your file has no GPS points. Here is why
Treadmills, turbo sessions and pool swims all record a great deal — and none of it is position. What that means for a print, and what you can do instead.
You exported the file, brought it over, and nothing was drawn. Almost always the same cause: the activity has no position data.
What indoor activities actually record
A treadmill run records time, pace derived from the belt or your wrist, heart rate, sometimes cadence. A turbo session records power, cadence, heart rate, speed from the trainer. A pool swim records strokes, lengths, rest intervals.
All useful. None of it is a coordinate.
GPS needs a sky. Indoors there is no signal worth using, so the watch does not record one — and a file with no coordinates cannot produce a shape. Strava's own export will hand you a GPX with no track points in it, which is why the file looks suspiciously small.
Why we do not fake it
It would be technically simple to take a treadmill run's distance, pick a plausible loop of the same length near your home, and draw that. Several things would then be true: the print would look right, the numbers would be correct, and the line would be a fabrication.
The premise here is that the line is a record of something that happened. A route you did not run is not that, however good it looks over the sofa.
What does work
Open water. A lake or sea swim has GPS and makes an unusually good drawing — a wobbling line with no roads to follow.
A heatmap of the outdoor half. If you also ride or run outside, a season's worth of those layered together produces a portrait of where you train. The indoor sessions are simply absent, which is itself accurate.
Waiting for spring. Not a satisfying answer, but the honest one.
Questions people actually ask
- Can you reconstruct the route from distance and time?
- No, and nobody can. Distance and time say how far and how long, not where. Any line drawn from them would be invented, and an invented route on a wall is a lie about a real effort.
- Does a pool swim have GPS?
- No. GPS does not work underwater and a lane pool would be a 25 m line anyway. Pool swims are counted by the watch's motion sensor. An open-water swim does have GPS and draws beautifully.
- Do indoor sessions show up in a heatmap?
- No. A heatmap is made of routes, and an activity with no route contributes nothing. A winter of turbo sessions leaves a thinner map than the riding felt.
- Is there anything printable from an indoor season?
- Not as a route. The honest answer is that the shape of an indoor effort is a number, not a line — and we only print lines.
YOURS, FROM A FILE, IN 90 SECONDS
One effort. One sheet of paper.
Bring the file and every choice is yours: treatment, colour, which numbers come along. Museum-grade 250 gsm matte, printed in Denmark, shipped in a tube with a nail taped inside.
Print it. FROM 349 kr