Recently I've written a couple quick hacks to extract data from Google Earth kml files and while I've been able to do what I want in relatively quick order, I've always had to delete the <kml> tags ...
I have a Garmin Edge 305 that I use for cycling. It saves data in an xml format (though with the extension tcx). There is a zipped copy of the file in question here. (169k zip, 3.5mb ...