Question on avoiding duplicate workouts, and how best to manage them

1

Hello there, I’m fairly new to using intervals.icu consistently now (was introduced to it last year but didn’t play around with it too much back then) and I have some hopefully simple questions.

I am a rower and train both on-the-water (out in racing shells) and on-land (using both the erg (rowing machine) and lifting) with an occasional run or bike along the way.

For the past year, I’ve been using a Garmin Forerunner 255 to track my on-the-water workouts, and I have my Garmin app automatically syncing those workouts to come into Intervals.icu and Strava.

For my on-land workouts, when on the rowing machine - I use C2’s “ErgData” app (logbook) on my phone to record my workouts, that app then sends data to Strava, which I believe then comes into Intervals.icu.

Now my question comes in, when doing an erg workout, I’m using C2’s “ErgData” app but then ignoring my Garmin watch in the process (as the rowing machine app just isn’t as accurate as connecting right to the machine).

^ Is this the best way to go about doing this?

My assumption was that if I’m just ignoring my watch, and doing a erg workout while wearing it still, wouldn’t that effect my typical stress readings and all of that? I figured that if I was on the water using the Garmin rowing app like I do, that Garmin knows then that I’m in a workout, but what about if another app is doing the recording? Is that okay to just have the watch keep collecting data as if it was any other time of day? And would that effect my metrics overall?

Also I saw recently that I could connect my C2 “ErgData” app to the Garmin Connect app, I wonder if that would solve any of the issues above that I mentioned.

Thank you for the long read, I just wanna make sure I’m getting off on the right foot with all of this. This app is amazing, even if I can use a 10th of it efficiently it’ll be massive.

Cheers!

2

When you row on the water, it sounds like you’re not starting an activity on your Garmin watch? I know some watches will automatically detect an activity and prompt you to start it manually, but the idea of just letting a watch track your HR and stress all day long and not actually tell it you’re doing a workout is strange to me. If you’re not recording a workout on the watch, only in ErgData, I think duplication would be minimal but who knows.

When I use my Concept2 SkiErg, I connect both my HR strap and the ErgData app on my phone to the erg (PM5). (This is the only activity type for which I don’t use a Garmin watch or bike computer.) I set up my Concept2 account to automatically upload to Garmin Connect and Strava. However, I only use Garmin to auto-upload to Intervals.icu (not Strava, to avoid duplication) and that connection only seems to work for workouts recorded by Garmin devices, not workouts sent from a third party like Concept2. So I’m importing manually for now, hoping for a better option.

1 Like
3

I came across this thread which suggests that connecting Strava in addition to Garmin should be fine, and should allow automatic upload from erg to Intervals.

1 Like
4

Shameless self-promotion, but you can use Rowsandall.com as a relay to get your data into intervals.icu. since January 1st automatic sync is part of the free plan.