Import

Import is where you put activity files into an athlete's workspace by hand, and check what landed. Drop files at the top of the page; the activity list at the bottom shows every imported activity and its processing state.

Connecting a watch for day-to-day sync is a separate, personal act — it authorizes your own provider account rather than an athlete workspace, so it lives in Settings → Integrations. See Integrations.

Import all your data#

Start by bringing your full history in — zones, training load, and analysis all get better with more history behind them.

1. Export your archive from your current platform. Garmin, COROS, Suunto, and Polar all offer full-history exports of your activities.
2. Open Import for the athlete and drop the files — FIT, TCX, and GPX are supported, in bulk.
3. Runtool queues, validates, and processes everything: each activity becomes a workout with a completion, structure, and load.

For day-to-day syncing after that, connect your device brand under Settings → Integrations — see Integrations for what each provider supports.

How an activity becomes a workout#

Every imported activity runs through the same pipeline:

1. Structure analysis. Runtool reads the manual laps and the stops, then compares each piece against the rest of the run to find the structurally significant parts — reps, recoveries, warmup, cooldown. Your zones decide the last question: whether the effort was actually hard.
2. Match or create. The analysed structure is matched against planned workouts on the same day. A match completes your planned workout; no match creates a new workout from the activity, titled after its structure.
3. Completion and load. The completion is generated — distances, paces, heart rate, time in zones — and the session load is computed from the timeseries data.

Activity-processing settings (track distance snapping, activity merging) tune this pipeline per workspace — see Athlete settings.

Manual activity import#

A single missing file — a race from a friend's watch, an old export — goes through the same dropzone. Drop the file and it processes like any synced activity.

No file at all? Log the workout by hand. Runtool works fully without a device: a logged workout carries a training load, weekly volume, and ACWR the same way a synced one does. See Log a workout.

Managing activities#

The activity list at the bottom of the page shows every imported activity with its processing state. From there you can:

• Reprocess an activity after changing processing settings or zones.
• Link or unlink an activity to a different workout, or merge activities that belong together.
• Download the original file — your data stays yours.
• Delete an activity.

Deleting an activity#

Deleting an activity removes the activity data and its stored file — the workout and its completion are preserved. Delete means "remove this file", not "undo the workout": if other activities remain linked to the workout, the completion is reprocessed from them. To remove a completion itself, do it from the workout.

FAQ#

Will importing create duplicates of activities that also sync?

Runtool detects activities it has already seen, so an overlap between an archive upload and a device sync doesn't double-count your training.

Do I need a watch to use Runtool?

No. Every workout can be logged by hand, and logged workouts feed load, volume, and analysis like synced ones. A device removes the typing and adds heart rate and pace detail — it does not unlock features.

How far back should I import?

As far as you can. Chronic load needs weeks of history to be meaningful, and efficiency trends only show over months.

My watch recorded one session as two files — now what?

Link both activities to the same workout (or enable activity merging in Settings), and the completion reflects the whole session.