100% private — files never leave your browser
TCX to GPX Converter
Turn TCX activities into the one GPS format everything opens. The track, elevation and timestamps carry over whole; the training structure — laps, summaries, calories — stays behind, because GPX has no place for it. The conversion happens entirely in your browser, and nothing is uploaded anywhere.
or click to browse — the output will be GPX; format is detected automatically
How to convert to GPX
- 1
Drop your file
Drag a FIT, GPX or TCX file onto the box above, or click it to browse. The source format is detected automatically from the file contents.
- 2
Wait a beat
The conversion runs in a background worker on your device. Typical activities finish in well under a second; even 50 MB files process without freezing the page.
- 3
Check the preview
Distance, duration, ascent and average heart rate are shown alongside a map of the converted track, so you can confirm nothing was lost before downloading.
- 4
Download
Click the download button and the .gpx file is saved straight from memory. Nothing was uploaded, so there is nothing to clean up.
What is a TCX file?
TCX (Training Center XML) is Garmin's older training format, introduced with Garmin Training Center in the mid-2000s and later extended by Strava and others. Like GPX it is XML, but TCX is structured around workouts rather than raw tracks: activities contain laps, laps contain tracks, and the schema natively understands training concepts — total time, distance, calories, heart rate zones and cadence — that plain GPX leaves to extensions.
Today TCX sits between two worlds: modern Garmin devices write FIT, while Strava's uploader still accepts TCX as a first-class citizen and many legacy coaching tools (TrainingPeaks imports, older Polar flows, Golden Cheetah archives) expect it. Converting into or out of TCX is usually about keeping lap structure and summary data intact while crossing between those generations of software.
What is a GPX file?
GPX (GPS Exchange Format) is the universal, open XML format for GPS data, standardized by TopoGrafix and supported by essentially every mapping application on earth — Strava, Google Earth, Komoot, RideWithGPS, Garmin BaseCamp, QGIS and hundreds of others. A GPX file stores waypoints, routes and tracks as latitude/longitude pairs, optionally with elevation and timestamps, and Garmin's TrackPointExtension carries heart rate, cadence and power alongside each point.
Because GPX is plain text XML, it is readable, diffable, scriptable and trivially editable — which makes it the lingua franca when a track needs to move between ecosystems. The cost is size: the same activity as GPX is typically 5-10× larger than FIT, and consumer-oriented apps sometimes ignore the extension channels. For archiving, editing and cross-platform sharing, though, GPX remains the safest long-term bet.
Why convert TCX to GPX?
TCX is a training format, and the training world is the only world that reads it. Google Earth, QGIS, BaseCamp and most mapping applications either ignore TCX entirely or quietly extract whatever track they can find and discard the rest of the file. GPX is the format every one of them was built around — converting is how a TCX track gets to see the wider software world.
Archiving is the other reason. A TCX library stays readable only as long as the Garmin-era toolchain around it does; GPX is plain text with no vendor and no schema evolution to track. Converting a season — or a decade — of TCX to GPX puts it in a format a text editor can still open in thirty years, which is the entire point of an archive.
Sharing closes it out. Send a GPX to anyone — a club mate, a cartographer, a race organizer — and whatever software they use will open it. Send a TCX and you have started a support conversation instead.
The track survives; the training does not
What converts is the recording: every track point with its position, elevation and timestamp, with heart rate, cadence and power riding along in the Garmin TrackPointExtension — the same mechanism Strava and Garmin use when they write GPX themselves. To mapping software the result is an ordinary track; to training-aware software, the physiological channels are still there to read.
What stays behind is everything TCX said about the workout rather than the ride: lap metadata with its triggers and totals, activity summaries, calories, creator and equipment notes. GPX has no element for any of it, and nothing is invented to compensate. If you need laps to stay structured, keep the TCX — or convert to FIT, where laps are native — and archive the GPX alongside it.
Your files never leave this browser
This tool — like every tool on this site — runs entirely as client-side JavaScript. The file you drop is parsed in a Web Worker on your own device, converted in memory and handed straight back to you as a download. There is no upload endpoint, no server-side conversion service and no temporary storage: you can watch the network tab in your browser's developer tools and confirm that no file bytes are transmitted anywhere.
That matters more with fitness data than with most files. A GPS track is a precise log of where you were, at what time, and how hard your heart was working — home address, training habits, favorite routes and race schedule all in one file. Keeping conversion on-device means third-party converters never get a copy of that log, and the tool keeps working identically on a plane, in a basement, or anywhere else without signal.
Frequently asked questions
They stop being structure and become just the track. GPX has no lap element, so lap metadata — trigger, totals, per-lap averages — is dropped along with the activity summary. The riding data itself (points, elevation, time, heart rate, cadence, power) is untouched, but if structured intervals matter for analysis, this is the wrong direction: FIT keeps laps as first-class data.