Your watch already measured the run. It knows the distance, the moving time, every split, and, if you wear a strap or a wrist monitor, what your heart was doing the whole way. Typing four of those numbers into a form afterwards is a strange thing to be asked to do.

So Pheidi will read the file instead. Export the activity from your watch app as a .fit file — WorkOutDoors, Garmin Connect, COROS, Suunto and most others can — hand it to Pheidi, and the workout is logged from what the file says.

Importing a run

Today's workout has an Import action beside Track and Done. Pick the .fit file and that's the whole interaction: the workout is marked complete with the file's distance, moving time, and average heart rate, and the splits are stored alongside it.

You can also import from the Recorded runs page without naming a workout. That saves the activity as an unplanned run, which still counts toward your training load, and you can attach it to a workout afterwards if it turns out to have been one.

What Pheidi takes from the file

  • Distance and moving time exactly as your watch recorded them. If it auto-paused at a traffic light, Pheidi keeps its timer time rather than recomputing a number that would disagree with the one you saw on your wrist.
  • Splits — one per mile or kilometre, whichever unit your plan uses, each with its own pace. A run that ends mid-unit gets a trailing partial split, marked as partial so you don't read a 0.3-mile run-out as a sudden collapse.
  • Heart rate, average and maximum for the run, and an average for each split. The per-split figure is time-weighted, so standing at a crossing doesn't get counted like a minute of effort.
  • Climb, where your device recorded altitude. Shown in feet on a miles plan and metres on a kilometres one.

What Pheidi does not take

Your route. Nearly every record in a .fit file carries a latitude and longitude, and Pheidi's importer never reads those fields at all. Not "reads them and throws them away" — never asks the file for them. Distance comes from the odometer reading each record already carries, which is why a treadmill file with no satellite fix in it imports exactly like an outdoor one.

The file itself. It is parsed in memory during the upload and dropped. There is no copy on Pheidi's servers, in a backup, or in a log. This is the same decision behind run tracking: a route is a map of where you live, work, and run alone at six in the morning, and the safest way to protect it is not to hold it.

Importing the same run twice

Nothing happens, which is the point. Pheidi recognises the activity from the recording device and the session's own start time, so a second upload — the natural thing to try when you're not sure the first one worked — tells you it's already imported rather than logging the workout again. If you deleted the run and re-upload it, Pheidi says so instead of quietly bringing it back.

When a file won't import

  • "That is a workout file, not a recorded activity." You've handed back the file Pheidi sent to your watch. You want the one your watch app saved after the run. See watch export for the difference.
  • "That is not a FIT file." Screenshots, GPX and TCX exports, and Apple Health dumps aren't .fit files. Look for a FIT export option in your watch app.
  • "That file could not be read all the way through." A truncated download. Export it again.
  • A bike ride imports, but Pheidi says out loud that the file was recorded as cycling before it counts toward your week — cross-training is real, forty miles of it landing as running load is not.

How it compares to Strava sync

Strava sync runs by itself in the background and needs no file handling, but it only knows what Strava's API gives it, and those numbers carry Strava's own usage restrictions. A .fit import is your own file off your own device: it carries splits and heart rate, it works for anything that exports FIT whether or not it talks to Strava, and nothing about it is withheld anywhere in Pheidi. Use whichever fits how you already record runs — or both.

FIT import lives inside the Pheidi app — sign in to use it.

See also