How to total your moving time for the year

The short answer

Export your recording history as a CSV file and sum the duration column, the same mechanical step as totalling distance or elevation gain for the year. The one thing worth deciding first is which duration that column actually holds — moving time, with stops taken out, or elapsed time, the plain clock from start to finish — because the two can tell noticeably different stories once a whole year of hikes is added into one number.

Two clocks, not one

Moving time is elapsed time with the stopped stretches subtracted — a lunch break on a bench, a long stop at a viewpoint, waiting at a junction for the rest of a group. Elapsed time is the plain clock: the moment recording started to the moment it stopped, with nothing taken out. Both are legitimate answers to "how long was that hike," they are just answers to slightly different questions, and a CSV export's duration column is only ever one of the two — never both at once, and not necessarily the same one from one app to the next.

Why the gap grows with the number of hikes, not the length of any one

A single hike's stopped time is usually small next to how long the hike itself took, so moving time and elapsed time for one outing rarely look dramatically different. A year of hikes is a different arithmetic problem. Every hike leaves behind its own stopped minutes — a photo, a snack, retying a boot lace, a pause to check a map — and a yearly moving-time total has all of that subtracted out, while a yearly elapsed-time total keeps every minute of it in. Forty hikes each carrying ten or fifteen stopped minutes adds up to several hours of difference between the two yearly figures, not because anything was measured wrong, but because the gap is the sum of every stop across every hike, and that sum only grows as the count of hikes grows.

That is why the mismatch between the two totals says almost nothing about how far or how long a year's hikes covered, and almost everything about how many separate outings went into the sum. A year built from a handful of long, continuous hikes accumulates less of a gap than a year built from many shorter hikes that each carried a stop of their own, even when the shorter hikes add up to less total distance.

Which total actually answers your question

Neither figure is the "real" one. Each is built to answer a different question, and a yearly total inherits whichever question the underlying duration was already answering.

• A moving-time total for the year answers something close to "how many hours did I actually spend walking" — time spent covering ground, with the stops it took to get there set aside.
• An elapsed-time total answers something closer to "how much of my days did hiking take up, stops included" — nearer to what a calendar would show if each outing were blocked out start to finish.

Whichever one gets summed, the part worth confirming first is which question it is answering, before comparing it against anything else — another year, another person's total, or a target set for yourself — because a moving-time total and an elapsed-time total are not interchangeable even when they describe the exact same hikes.

Adding it up in a spreadsheet

Summing the duration column

A single SUM formula over the duration column in Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets totals every row in the file, whether the year held a dozen hikes or two hundred. The formula itself is no different from summing distance — the decision that matters happened earlier, when you confirmed which duration that column actually holds.

Filtering by activity or month

A filter on the activity column narrows the total to hiking alone if the same history also holds rides or runs; a filter on the date column narrows it to a single month or season, using the same spreadsheet and the same column.

Sorting to see where the time actually went

Sorting the same rows by duration instead of adding them up surfaces the outings that took up most of the year's time — sometimes a handful of long days, sometimes a steady spread of shorter ones — a shape a single yearly total cannot show on its own.

Things that trip people up

• Summing a duration column without checking whether it holds moving time or elapsed time first — the total is arithmetically correct either way, it is just an answer to a question you may not have meant to ask.
• Mixing hikes recorded with automatic stop-detection into the same total as hikes where every pause was tapped manually — the two methods can classify the same kind of stop differently, so the rows behind a single total were not necessarily built the same way.
• Comparing a moving-time yearly total from one app against an elapsed-time yearly total from another as though they measure the same thing — the gap between them is not a fixed offset that can be subtracted back out, since it depends on how many stops that particular year's hikes happened to include.
• Expecting a yearly time total to behave like a yearly distance total — distance only has one definition per hike, duration has two, and only one of them is sitting in the column that just got summed.

Where TrailCam fits in

TrailCam reports a single duration figure per hike, and that figure is already moving time — pausing is a deliberate tap rather than an automatic guess at your speed, so time spent paused is excluded before the number is ever shown or exported. The whole route history exports as one CSV file with that duration column included alongside distance, elevation gain and activity type, so summing it for the year gives a moving-time total without first having to work out which of two clocks the column represents. The same history is available as GPX 1.1 if the routes themselves are ever needed. Export is part of the optional TrailCam Pro upgrade; the app itself is free to download.