Import Soul Wouldn’t it be nice if things just worked

6Sep/111

Analyzing Skiing Data

My favorite sport would have to be skiing by far, nothing can match the awesome thrill and relaxation that it provides. Over the past few years I have begun skiing with a handheld GPS so that I have been able to record things like distance traveled, max speed ect.

While this has provided some interesting stats over the years such as and overall top speed of 88.8 km/h or a total distance traveled in a single day as 81km, I have always wanted to be able to see more detail on my day's skiing.

This year I have finally got around to having a crack at making a program to analyze GPX file that my GPS records and trying to separate data from lifts and ski-runs. After a few hours procrastinating during exam week and a few hours on a bus on the way to our school ski trip i have managed to come up with a woefully inefficient but reasonably effective program that is able to do just that.

My program takes the GPX file and outputs a range of statistics on runs and lifts as well as outputting a KML with the ski-runs separated from lifts. Here is some example data from my current version of the program generated from last day of skiing on the trip.

Runs:			| 28
Lifts:			| 24
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Max run speed		| 94.06
Ave run speed		| 10.035
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Max run length:		| 3568
Min run length:		| 49
Ave run length:		| 1459
Total run length:	| 40877
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Max lift length:	| 1763
Min lift length:	| 389
Ave lift length:	| 921
Total lift length:	| 28319.7737391

This data is reasonably accurate except for the maximum speed which is only measured as an inaccurate point speed (I will soon average speeds over a few data-points) and the discrepancy between the number of runs and the number of lifts is caused by things like the loss of GPS reception when I went into a restaurant for lunch.

To accompany the raw data here are some screen shots from within Google Earth. In the pictures chairlifts are represented by the solid read lines and the runs are represented by the squiggly blue lines. The pins in the middle of each lift are click-able and provide statistics on the lift when clicked.

Direct top down view

A slightly side on view

A closeup of the lift data

Unfortunately there is no version of this program that i deem suitable for download at the current time. In the future i plan to work on this further making it more efficient as well as turning it into a website where people are able to upload their skiing data to generate their own maps and statistics as well as including some social aspects into the process.