Ok, it’s not a big deal, but this REALLY irritates me.
Sometime earlier this month, Zwift rides stopped counting towards cycling Badges in Garmin (when Zwift is set to interface to Garmin). The activities still are recorded (thank goodness), but those activities no longer ‘count’ towards badges.
I talked to Garmin and they purposely disabled this feature - saying it was a software mistake that it EVER worked. What bull****. The ‘workaround’ is to run your Garmin cycling head unit in parallel, paired to your smart trainer, and then rides will count.
What difference should it make that non-Garmin sourced cycling activities going into Connect should be crippled versus any other activity. I ride year round, but I use a trainer/Zwift in the winter. It’s a silly thing, but I find these progress badges highly motivating, so it’s a drag that I have to do all these extra choreography to get activities recorded.
One of the interesting side effects of this ‘bug’ is that about a month ago I did a ride on Rouvy on a route just outside of Warsaw, Poland. After the ride Garmin awarded me the ‘Frosty’ badge for riding at a temp below freezing. I guess it was cold in Warsaw that day, but I was plenty comfy in my basement!
I was looking in to the Garmin badges too, and specifically the challenge badges. The terms do say that the activity needs to be recorded on a Garmin or Tacx device
You bring up an interesting point. I am on Zwift using a TACX FLUX trainer - you’d think that would be allowed. Until you read more fine print that the activity has to be send to Garmin directly. So Zwift nullifies that.
Badges worked for YEARS with my setup, so it’s not a technical issue. Now some marketing weenie at Garmin decided to disable this.
There’s a large thread at the Garmin forums concerning this:
From my point of view they did a dumb descision. I thought badges should motivate people doing more sports. Every user of Garmin Connect owns at least one Garmin device. As long as they treat Garmin Connect as a central plattform for all activities their users did, it should not matter which device is used for recording.
I’m using a Texc Neo (means: a Garmin device), Vecor pedals (Garmin device), a Fenix Watch (guess what) and several other Garmin stuff. If I decide to record an activity by Zwift I’m still using Garmin devices. But I’m not RECORDING the activity with any. From my point of view those rides should count for the Badges.
Maybe we should flood the forums and the Garmin support with the request of letting Zwift rides count again (they say it was a bug that rides counted in the past).
For the ones of us who don’t want to wait if they will change the rules, there’s a simple solution:
Disconnect Zwift from Garmin that the activities aren’t uploaded automatically anymore
Select any Garmin device as new device (I’m using one of the Edge devices for example)
Download the generated file
Manually upload the new file (fitfiletools.fit) to Garmin
Now you have the complete data from Zwift, including HR, slope, GPS… in Garmin and Garmin Connect says “recorded by xxxx” (where xxx is the device you’ve chosen before) instead of “uploaded by Zwift” - and your ride is counted for the badges.
From my point of you they are simply dumb. Every experienced user knows how to modify fit files. Now we have a lot of work to do instead to simply connect Zwift with Garmin and everything’s fine like it was in the past
Yep, I’m one of them. I have a $3K NeoBike and you are gonna lock me out because I’m not using a Garmin Device? Let me connect my Edge, oh what, it doesn’t pull all of the data that Zwift does and now I have a duplicate file. Pure anti-consumer corporate ****.
Dude, You just saved my 12 points I lost from this decision. Thank you so much for this info and all the links. I hope they swap back in the future. I feel like they are doing it due to the chance someone could turn their resistance to zero and just spin to get badges. But those people are only cheating themselves.
100% agreed there. Even if someone was motivated to do so, how is Garmin out ANYTHING if someone decides to ‘cheat’ and get a few extra badges? Does it affect their bottom line? No. Is there any 3rd party that uses Garmin badges for any sort of evaluative purpose? No. Have they managed to piss off a lot of people? Heck, yes.
Badges, for me, are completely motivational. They are fun. They spark healthy competition. There is no practical reason I can think of why Garmin would go and royally piss people off unless there’s some totally out-of-touch Garmin executive that believes this improves their market share, etc., or some other such useless company metric.
Thank you so much for this, I am however having trouble completing the process that you describe. I can get to point five, but then the fitfiletools website doesn’t seem to do anything, it just says ‘upload starting, please wait.’ but nothing happens. Am I missing a step somewhere? or could my computer be blocking it?
It’s pointless to continue trusting garmin as a result of this - I switched from garmin as consolidation point (have a garmin watch which I use for everything not zwift) to strava as consolidation point (paid) - more challenges and more fun - bye garmin.
i think this affect the running side as well… none of my zwift run were counted since Januray 2021 towards the overall mileage i did, only those physical run outside that counted… with the pandemic still going on… we are all trying to do less “real” run and more on “virtual”…
I’m using fitfiletools nearly every day - it’s working fine. I just did a successful test just before writing this response. I’m using Google Chrome and (mostly) Firefox.
The site is using a lot of javascript - so you have to ensure that it’s not disabled within your browser. (I did a quick test with disabled javascript: the site isn’t loading at all - so I think JS is enabled within your browser otherwise you won’t see anything)
I’m not sure if there might be problems with a firewall ort antivirus software on your computer. If you are using software like this you might consider to disable it for a moment. If fitfiletools will work after that you could do some further investigations.
Maybe it might be a good idea to do tests with another browser (without any running plugins) first.
Thanks for getting back to me, I’ve managed to work it out. Not sure if it is just an issue with my computer or a wider Mac IOS issue but once I’ve downloaded the .fit file if I try and drag and drop it from the download tab in Safari it doesn’t work, I have to browse for the file in the computers download file dragging and dropping seems to result in corrupting the .fit file. Seems very bizarre but at least I’ve worked it out, can’t quite believe I’m having to do all this ‘leg work’ to get a fictitious badge from Garmin!! : ).
I’m on MacOS, too - but I never tried it the way you do
I didn’t even know that it’s possible to use drag and drop from the download-tab within Safari (which is 'cause I nearly never use Safari caused by the lack of useful plugins).
But I’m glad you found a working solution!
An easy method that doesn’t require third party software…
I don’t sync Zwift to Garmin; instead just sync to Strava - I run my Fenix 6 concurrently (indoor bike activity) during Zwift and then once it’s uploaded to connect I just edit the data to match Zwift. The only thing you don’t get is a pretty map. If you can manage with out that this is the easiest method.
Make sure you calibrate the trainer correctly (input the correct circumference for your trainer) otherwise you get some whacky readings but mine’s within a few miles now and FTP between Garmin & Zwift is usually within 1. Just add the elevation.
This counts towards badges, inputs towards your training load etc.
this would work with running as well (treadmill activity). I’ve been doing the April climb challenge this way.
(which is 'cause I nearly never use Safari caused by the lack of useful plugins).