Are there any route planning/mapping apps or websites that can show a chart of cumulative ascent?

Question

Strava and Ride With GPS both show elevation charts, but they show elevation at any particular point in the ride, i.e. on a circular route with 2000m of climbing the charts will go up and down but they will always finish at the same elevation they started.
I'm looking for a way of showing a chart that adds up the ascent/climbing as it goes, so the same route would have a chart that always increased and ended up at 2000m. Is there an easy way to do this for any given GPX file?

Chris H · Accepted Answer

Starting from any route-planning tool that can export GPX, you can do this on my website. It's more about the mapping and planning rides for Veloviewer Explorer, but I've added a graph showing cumulative ascent below the map that displays multiple GPXs. Multiple rides can be plotted, automatically colour coded to match the map. Processing is handled on your own machine using javascript; nothing is uploaded to my server. Just drag and drop the GPX onto the map.

The code is also available at GitHub under the most permissive of licenses.

Originally I took this as an interesting challenge to my spreadsheet skills. The spreadsheet I created (xlsx, original LibreOffice ods) takes a GPX file pasted into one sheet, and displays on another sheet a graph of cumulative elevation, as well as calculating the distance at which you've done half the climbing.

It doesn't attempt to parse the XML of the GPX file; everything is done in cell formulae. This means that each track point is assumed to look like this and to not have a timestamp (so it works for RideWithGPS and Strava routes, but not Komoot).

<trkpt lat="51.53166" lon="-2.4620100000000003">
    <ele>57.870000000000005</ele>
</trkpt>

This is what the output looks like:

I'll probably write something in javascript as well, and host it; that would allow the route to be displayed on a map.

Dan K · Answer

Strava will give you a breakdown of YTD figures on distance, time and elevation.

For this year I’ve covered 9600 ft across all rides, as you can see I don’t go out my way to find hills.
You can find it under your profile settings.
If your handy with spreadsheets you could easily track elevation using data from apps, you could do this via api calls if the 3rd party app allows users access to API.
If they don’t allow API you could still easily log your own data into a spreadsheet.
Alternatively look into reading the fit or tcx files using a suitable editor and pull the elevation data directly from these.
Looking back at Strava it will also give you your elevation gains under each ride / activity.

You can see the highest elevation was less than 400ft but over the course of the ride I covered 837ft.
For simplicity you really can’t beat Strava though for having all that you need though.

Are there any route planning/mapping apps or websites that can show a chart of cumulative ascent?

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