I ride to work and the Garmin tracks the ride – I hit start as I leave. When I get there I hit stop. I then switch the unit off and it stays off until I leave again. I switch on, hit start, ride, then hit stop when I get to my end point.

I then plug it in to my PC and it seems to upload it as a single ride – so about 11 miles over about 10 hours, but actually it was 11 miles over 40 minutes.

What am I needing to do to the Garmin so it records them as 2 different rides?

Thanks.

Er.. What type of Garmin?

On an Edge you need to press and hold lap/reset

Press and hold reset on my 800.

Sorry, Garmin 500.

So my pressing the start/stop button am I actually pausing it? The device reports Timer Started and Timer Stopped when I hit the button…

yes

On the 500 press and hold “Lap/Reset” after having stopped your ride with “Start/Stop”.

Ok, thanks.

That trick hasn’t stopped the 2 rides being combined into 1 route…I may have to revert to doing the worst possible thing – RTFM…

Press stop. It will beep and you’ll get a message on screen saying “timer stopped”
Hold lap/reset until it counts down from 3 to 1 and beeps. Let go when it beeps. The counters should all zero.
Doing this is what signals the garmin to convert the file to a “fit” file. It means you won’t lose the ride data if the unit accidently powers down too.

Ah OK…I hadn’t held the lap button long enough. Thanks.

Hijacking, sorry… Dakota 20. I’ve taken to resetting the counter and clearing previous tracks to get round this same problem. Is there an easier way, cos that approach is going to fail if I don’t have a chance to upload between rides…

For the Dakota or similar, probably best to turn on the option for “Auto Archive”. This should automatically save the track as a GPX file, and clear the current track.
So set it to do this daily. Then you can download all of the archived tracks afterwards.

Note you can edit the tracks after downloading them to your computer. eg using Garmin Basecamp, you can split or join tracks, or delete parts you don’t want.

Cheers Craig, I’ll give that a go. 🙂

I just use the reset/clear option on Dakota prior to each ride. I think I ran into a problem with daily auto archive when my ride straddled midnight and it started a new, second one from 00:01.