In the TCX format, how is a trackpoint marked as paused?

Question

During an exercise, Garmin allows you to pause recording so that your split times and pace are not affected. How are these paused periods represented in the TCX format? I've looked through the TCX schema, but did not find an obvious answer.

Answer 1

The activity in a TCX file is divided into laps. Each lap contains one or more Tracks which contain Trackpoints which are the individual records of position, heart rate, and so on. If you pause and restart the watch, the pause closes the current track, and the restart opens a new Track. So, for instance, if you pause twice in the first mile, using auto lap at each mile, the first Lap will contains three Tracks. Analysis software should use this structure to work out that the watch paused after the last Trackpoints in each Track and restarted at the first Trackpoint in the next Track.

I couldn't find any documentation of this either; it's based on inspection of Garmin data when I was working on the same problem when I needed to convert Timex .pwx files into TCX to upload to a site that didn't properly support pwx.