Workout Builder & Garmin

I have been having issues with Workout Builder intervals and Garmin. I tend to think that the issue is on Garmin’s end as the text in the workout in GC looks correct, but Garmin does not process it correctly.

The first issue I ran into happened a handful of times where Garmin would just skip the “Set 6x”, which resulted in WU/Active interval/Recovery interval/CD. This I think was due to extra tab returns that are introduced when I copy the text from Excel to the Workout Builder. I work around this by using the Workout Builder and adding all the steps manually instead of copy/pasting from Excel.

Today though was a similar issue but instead of skipping the “Set 6x” it pulled in the CD into the repeated set.
Workout from here:
image

Workout in Garmin pushed by Intervals.icu:
image
I had not notice until looking into this issue, but if look at the second line of that screenshot with the date it has the incorrect total distance of 12.59 miles instead of 7.59 miles (increase of 5 miles which makes sense on how Garmin seems to be reading the workout).

How Garmin interpreted the workout:
image

I am at a loss as to what is going on really. It seems that the workouts get pushed over correctly as the text all seems correct, but I do not always check the Garmin estimated distance because I had not had any issues until maybe about 6-8 weeks ago and just only workouts with sets in them.

My workflow for creating workouts is that I have a calendar that I keep in Excel which builds the format needed for Intervals.icu. I then copy/paste those workouts into the Workout Builder here which then pushes the workouts to Garmin. This process only seems to introduce issues then with workouts that have a “Set #x component to them which is typical one (1) workout a week. It seems to be the extra tab returns that Excel seems to introduce when I copy from there into here, but it only is an issue with workouts with sets.

I am not sure if anyone has come across this issue, and I am not even sure it is an actual issue on Interval’s end. Seems it might be an issue with Garmin although if I create the workout by hand in Intervals I do not seem to get this issue to occur.

When you paste one of the “bad” workouts from Excel into the Intervals.icu workout builder does the issue occur?

Yes, but only for the workouts with intervals. The workouts where it is just a warm up, run, and cooldown I have not seen any issues.

I have done some testing and have figured out that because I have merged columns from which I am copying the text for the workout from, Excel inserts tabs for each “blank” column. This causes issues for either how Intervals then creates and pushes that workout to Garmin or when the workout is passed to Garmin, Garmin does not know how to interpret those extra tabs. I am not sure why it only effects workouts with intervals and not all is a bit unusual, but I am guessing it is due to the two (2) blank lines within the workout.

So I am in the process of making some minor formatting changes to my Excel Workout Builder to hopefully prevent this issue going forward.

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