In Need of a Rest Day

In Need of a Rest Day

Byrichard

Today I went for a 12km walk over two hours in 26°c heat. According to the Suunto 5 Peak I have depleted my resources. I am at just three percent now. I need a proper night of sleep and some rest to recover.

Productive Training

According to the Suunto app I am in productive training and my fitness is increasing, but in the process my form is declining. I am, at least theoretically overtraining. This is not unusual for me. I walk, cycle or run every single day. It has been my routine for years.

Waking Earlier

What is not routine is getting up at 6 or 7, to do sports in the morning. Usually I do it in the afternoon, after a productive morning. I prefer to study and blog, before I go for my daily walk, bike ride or run. I prefer to be fresh, when I need to think, and procrastinate once my focus is gone.

Looking at Steps With the Apple Fitness App

Earlier I noticed that I could change which metric I was looking at, so I chose to look at steps rather than calories burned. I am currently losing patience with the Apple Watch and Apple Fitness App. The phone knows how many steps I have taken, and yet it insists on showing the data from the Apple Watch.

Cruel Weather

There was a time when we would be desperate for good weather so that we could do things. Now I want the opposite. I’m tired of the never-ending sunshine and never having an excuse to take a rest day. If the weather was bad then I could think “tomorrow I’m staying in.

The weather forecasst for the rest of the forseeable future is sunny and warm, and I’m tired of it always being sunny. I never exptected that I would want rain.

The landscape desperately needs rain. It rains, but so little that the ground doesn’t soften enough to absorb the rain, so we’re back to walking on dirt, rather than mud. In the last two or three months, maybe even longer, I have had to clean my shoes of mud twice.

I miss the rain. I miss the excuse to stay in and study. When the weather never changes, rain becomes a treat. I never expected that I would want rain

And Finally

I wrote this post a day early because tomorrow morning I’ll be procrastinating rather than studying.

Reverting to a Single Watch

Reverting to a Single Watch

Byrichard

Today I asked Google Bard whether I should wear two watches at a time and it told me not to. Specifically it told me not to wear a Garmin watch, and a Suunto watch at the same time as they may interferer with each other and more. Before the Apple Watch I only wore one watch at time. I wore the Suunto Spartan watch. When I got the Apple Watch I started to wear two watches at a time because they feed two different databases and the data is not shared from one to the other.

That Was Before

Recently, I noticed that Sports Tracker plays very nicely with the Apple Watch so it tempted me to play with Suunto again, but Suunto does not play nicely with the Apple Fitness App. Neither the Apple Watch nor the Garmin watch play nicely with each other. The result is that if you want data from Suunto, and Garmin, and Apple, you need to wear three watches, for the three apps. Since I have two wrists I can feed two services at once. We are forced either to wear two or three watches, or give up on collecting data for one service.

What Bard Thinks

When asked whether I should wear a Suunto and a Garmin Google Bard feels that I should pick just one and stick with it. If I ask it how many people wear two watches it tells me:

“There is no definitive answer to this question, as it is difficult to track how many people wear two watches. However, anecdotally, it seems that the number of people who wear two watches is increasing.”

If you are considering wearing two watches, I recommend trying it out and seeing how you feel. There is no harm in experimenting, and you may find that you like it more than you thought you would.

Why Limit Myself

I am not wearing two watches because I like wearing two watches. I am wearing two watches because Garmin and Apple want to force me to wear their devices in order to get data so that I can use their apps. With Sports Tracker, and the Apple watch I can track what I do via the Suunto App and via the Suunto App, I can update Sports tracker and Apple, but not the fitness App.

Data Clashes

The other reason for which I want to reduce the number of watches I wear, down to one, is that Suunto and Apple Fitness data clash, so after a one and a half hour walk the Apple Fitness app says that I have burned one to two hundred calories rather than the 500+ that both fitness trackers agree with. I look eccentric for nothing if I wear the Suunto watch and the Apple watch together.

Bard’s Opinion

As I wrote this blog post I asked Google Bard a number of questions. In so doing I learned that it discourages you from wearing two different brand watches at the same time due to possible interference and more. If you want advice about which to pick though, it will provide you with what makes them different from each other. Google Bard will provide you with a side by side comparison of the key feature differences between two or more watches.

And Finally

The Suunto 5 Peak will become my primary watch. The Garmin Etrex SE can track my walks and hikes, and the Garmin Explore device can track my bike rides. It’s amusing that in all of this thought and consideration I don’t think of Strava, where all of this data is collected anyway. I lost interest in Strava years ago, when I read about venture capitalists investing millions, because at that point the site stopped being on a human level.

Wearing one watch at a time is fine.

The Suunto 5 Peak and Suunto App
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The Suunto 5 Peak and Suunto App

Byrichard

A few weeks, or even months ago, I noticed that the Suunto and Sports Tracker apps play very nicely with the Apple watch, especially Sports Tracker. For this reason I spent quite a bit of time playing with the sports tracker app with the iphone. In fact it almost convinced me that I would get a new apple watch, to play with sports tracker.

Apple Watches are Expensive

The Series Four Apple Watch I have now is over four years old with a charge cycle every day of those four years. As a result of this the charge does not last as long as it used to. It barely survives the day now. It loses 25 percent when I’m sleeping with it on my wrist.

I considered replacing the Series Four with the SE because the SE is the cheapest apple watch available but it’s still over three hundred francs. The Garmin 45s is about 150 CHF and so is the Suunto Peak 5. The Garmin 45s is a speciality watch, focused mainly on running, and to give you VO2 max info. The battery lasts a day or two before it is desperate for a new charge.

Buyer’s Remorse with Garmin

Although I like the Garmin Instinct now I had problems with the Garmin Etrex 32, the Garmin Instinct, and was disappointed by the Garmin 45s. I wasn’t so happy with the strap, with battery life and with visible GPS mistakes. I am happy with the Etrex SE but it still feels a little limited, unless you love geocaching. If you like geocaching then this device is awesome. I am not yet a fan of geocaching.

The Suunto App

I have been tracking workouts with Sports Tracker, which was then bought by Suunto before becoming the Suunto App and they have recently used AI to provide a text based coach. It tells you how you’ve been sleeping, how you’ve been working out, what type of workout you’re doing and more. It also provides a heat map of your workouts for the previous month automatically, without paying a premium, since you already paid for their watch, via the Suunto app. The Sports Tracker does want payment for certain features.

The Suunto Peak 5

For a while I was sad to see that Suunto had dumped their watch os for Android’s watch OS instead and I expected them to fold and give up. It has been a few years since then and Suunto is still around and adding features, which is why I decided to plunge and revert to Suunto watches. The Suunto Peak 5 is the cheapest watch they sell, for 139 CHF if you’re not bothered by colour and looks.

I have now worn the watch for several days and worn it 24 hours a day for several days, with no wrist problems, skin problems, app problems or battery problems. It did nag me twice. It nagged me once for starting a workout without waiting for the wrist HR monitor to be ready, and a second time for not waiting for the GPS to be ready. Other than that it has been fine

What I’ve tracked

I have tracked at least two walks, two bike rides and more. I have also used it as a timer and alarm clock and these features worked fine too. It took a few days before I setup the sleep function but for two or three days my sleep has been tracked.

Compared to the Spartan Wrist HR Baro

Compared to the Suunto Spartan Wrist HR Baro it’s small and elegant. It fits nicely on the wrist. Instead of having a strap that has a think through which you thread the strap it has a button, like with the apple watch but for the end of the strap. It doesn’t flap around or get loose when you’re showering or doing sports. With the Garmin Instinct and other watches it’s easy for the strap to come lose and flap around.

No Buyer’s Remorse, So Far

The Suunto Peak 5 is not a new watch. It has been around for years. I didn’t get it because I was annoyed that Suunto had changed OS, but also because I felt that it was not an upgrade compared to the Suunto Spartan Wrist HR baro. It has fewer features but that can be used for fitness training. Due to the heatwave I haven’t been pushing as hard as I would with lower temperatures.

Amused by the Old Charger

One of the surprises when I opened the packaging was the charging cable. It’s the same as I had for the ambit 3 and other devices, rather than the spartan. The new cable is shorter though, so it’s nice that I can now choose between using the old charging cable when I need more reach, or the new one when I want to save on weight, or waste less energy on cable resistance.

The Case for Cheaper Watches

The range in price for Suunto watches is from 139 CHF for the Suunto Peak 5 to over 800 CHF for the Peak 9. The normal range is from 300 CHF upwards. In contrast the Apple Watch SE starts from 255 CHF upwards, but it has to be charged almost daily and it is fragile.

In my experience, and as you can read from certain reviews watches like the Peak 5 cost less but give the same user experience as the more expensive watches. Several reviews speak about how good the GPS is, and how light the watch is. They also speak about how good the battery is. It’s ideal for my use case.

And Finally

The Suunto 5 Peak, despite being a cheap watch provides a lot of functionality. The Garmin 45s is cheaper, lighter, and smaller, but it doesn’t feel as well finished and the GPS is more erratic. As I struggled with the conclusion to this blog post I checked the GPS track of my walk yesterday. I was geocaching at two points so I looked at the squiggles when I was under trees and a bridge and the tracks are crisp. I am using GPS and Galileo combined.

So far I am very happy with the Suunto 5 Peak. If you’re looking for a low cost tracker, to use daily, then it works well.

My Lack Of Interest In the Apple Watch Ultra

My Lack Of Interest In the Apple Watch Ultra

Byrichard

I see people are training for ultrarunning events, scuba diving and more with the Apple Watch Ulta, but I feel no interest in such a watch. The first reason for my lack of interest is that the watch is stupidly expensive for something that lasts just 30 hours on a single charge. I would expect a watch to last at least three or four weeks between charges, and at least a week with daily use. The Ultra does neither.


The second reason for my lack of interest is that Apple watches are fragile. They are not protected from being bashed or knocked when climbing or doing other things. I broke one screen. indoor climbing. With Suunto watches I climbed for years with barely a scratch.


The Third reason is that when you’re diving in cold waters you want a big, clear, easy to read display that is reliable. I trust Suunto to make reliable dive computers, but as a secondary device. My primary device was a Mares Icon HD. This is a large, clear, easy to read dive computer. This is from a few years ago. The point is that for cold water diving I want specialist gear by specialist device makers. It has to be trustworthy.


The fourth reason is that there are perfectly suitable devices for between 100-350 CHF. You don’t need to spend more on a watch than on a fragile device. I want something that tracks my daily walks, hikes, runs and bike rides, without worrying about it breaking. Cheap devices have plenty of functionality. I’d even toy with the idea of getting an Apple watch SE, because cheap watches last as long as expensive watches and some devices are bought for three or four years of use, not a lifetime.


The fifth reason is that a touch screen is often not useful when hiking, diving and more. You need buttons because you can navigate by memory, rather than by looking intently, and because with buttons you don’t need to take your gloves off to use the device.


The Final reason is that Apple watches are designed to make you want to swap them out every second or third year. If you buy the top of the range watch this year then next year or the year after you will want to swap it out, and then again after that. It’s better to buy a watch at a reasonable price, that does what you want, that will least three to four years. The Series four lasted four years. The Suunto Spartan lasted until the strap started to break and the battery started to decline. The Ambit three lasted for many many happy years of use.


If we were not in a pandemic, and if life was normal I’d be focused on doing a variety of sports, and I wouldn’t be so distracted by devices. I’d get the gear I need for the sports I want to do, and I’d do them. My desire to experiment with a variety of devices is due to the pandemic. In better times I would be focused on driving hundreds of kilometres a month, to do things. Not at the moment.


And Finally


I get pleasure from looking at the breadth and diversity of options. If I choose the cheaper options then if I play with them for a year or two, before moving on, then I do not feel wasteful. Three or four years ago I was tempted to get a cycling computer but resisted that urge because I don’t have the use case for it. I do love to cycle but sports watches do the same, and more. They are not dedicated to a single use.


Five Years With The Suunto Spartan

Five Years With The Suunto Spartan

Byrichard

I have had the Suunto Spartan for around five years, the Apple watch Series Four for Four and the Instinct since November 2021 and I find myself gravitating back towards the Suunto Spartan watch again. I pivoted away from the watch and Suunto because it moved towards WearOS and smartwatches, rather than sticking to fitness tracking.


I was afraid that MovesCount, known as Suunto App now, and the Sportstracker app would both be killed off or allowed to die but this hasn’t happened. I see that Sportstracker and the Apple watch play quite nicely together so if I want the power of sportstracker and the Suunto app I can stick to an Apple watch.


Curious about Apple


I bought the Series 3, which I broke indoor climbing out of curiousity, and regretted it, and for some reason I was so annoyed with the screen break that I still bought a series four and that has lasted four years, so it outlasted the other watch by four or more years.


Frequent Pair


The Garmin Instinct has a fatal flaw, in my eyes. It often decides that it no longer wants to connect. You need to “pair phone” on a regular basis. This is easy to fix, and takes seconds, but it is a flaw that I have noted with several Garmin devices. If I pair a device I want it to remain paired until I change phone, or change watch. I don’t want to regularly pair my devices. They should be “pair and forget”.


Fitness Focused


One of the beauties of the Suunto App, which is based on movescount, which is based on SportsTracker is that the app is focused on your progression, your efforts, your workouts, your recovery time and your life. Garmin and Apple want you to focus on games, badges, rewards and more. Suunto just gives you a way to track the day’s effort, see how long it will take to recover and then get on with your day. That’s how it should be.


Signs of age


After five years of use the strap is still in good condition except that one of the rubber strap holders has broken off. The battery life is not as good as it used to be. It has one easy to see scratch on the surface. A little paint has been stripped off the top bezel. It isn’t easy to see.


Too Big


The one flaw of this watch is that it’s big on the wrist. When you wear shirts you can’t easily slide it under a sleeve. It’s hard to access under layers in winter. A slimmer watch would be better.


Durability


I use my fitness tracking watches for one to two hours per day. They last for years. My Suunto Ambit 3 is still alive and could still be used. These watches might feel expensive but when you consider that you get five or more years of use the cost goes down to 100 CHF per year. According to Suunto I have 3100 tracked activities and 23,000 kilometres of distance covered.


I am tempted to return to Suunto now that I see the app has survived the transition to WearOS. That’s why I looked around in the first place.

Apple Health Step Data Sources
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Apple Health Step Data Sources

Byrichard

Yesterday I spent some time looking through Apple Health Data Sources. I see that there are plenty of data sources. These are the Apple watch, the iphone, Alltrails, move, connect, stepsapp, pacer, Suunto, Ingress and three more that are marked as inactive.


Move is the app that gets data from some Casio watches. Connect is Garmin connect and gets step data from Garmin devices. If I take steps and they are logged with a casio or a garmin device they do not count in iOS apps but if I take steps with Garmin and Casio devices without also wearing the Apple watch the same steps are not counted.


The Apple Fitness and Health apps have access to all the same data. Everything goes to a central database on the iPhone. It’s from the iphone that the data is not shared transparently between all other apps.


In practice whether you have a suunto, Garmin, Apple Watch or other fitness tracker each device should feed, or retrieve data from Apple health, and each should display that data, regardless of which device you wear.


Whether I wear my Garmin, Suunto or Apple watch I would like all three to access health data transparently so that I can choose which individual watch I want to wear on a specific day. I don’t want to have to wear all three of them. Not that I do. I only have two wrists. 😉 I can only wear two at once.


The privacy argument is moot, because each app can be granted access to Apple Health, and Apple Health can be granted access to each app. This means that all the data is already transiting both ways for all apps.


And Finally


When you buy a Casio or other watch the battery is expected to last from three years to ten years, and you are expected to replace the battery when it dies. With the Apple watch, now that it is four years old, the next step would be to swap the battery. The Apple watch is now at 70 percent. The battery costs 79 CHF to replace.


When the Suunto battery got low on the Ambit 3 I got a Spartan, but when I replaced the Spartan I went for a Garmin, so I lost the ability to keep my old log going, and had to migrate to the Garmin app. With the Apple Watch we’re on yet another silo. Every brand has a silo. With the Apple watch it’s worse, because you have the fitness app, but then you have all the third party apps. Everything would break at once if you stop using the Apple Watch.


I would love for Garmin, Suunto and Apple wath to allow the free flow of tracking data in both directions, so that I could choose the best device to wear, and the best app to fiddle around with. Strava is the giant in the room, but I don’t want to use an app where I have to pay a premium for added functionality.



Of Blue Skies and Autumn Leaves

Of Blue Skies and Autumn Leaves

Byrichard

Today we might as well speak of blue skies and autumn leaves because that is what we’re facing. The Septemper/Autumn grey clouds, fog, and cold are not here yet. Instead we have warm sunny days. The habit of walking one and a half hours a day is perfectly safe, with such a stable weather system.


Sigg Bottles


I have two Sigg water bottles, the half litre and the one litre. For months or even a year they lied dormant due to the pandemic and attempts to clean them. I used the tablets but I didn’t like the taste so I left them aside. Yesterday or the day before I decided to take a sponge and clean the exterior and mouth of the bottles. That’s when the taste I expect from these bottles came back.


Previously I had cleaned the bottles with a brush but that didn’t work. Using a sponge did. It is something so simple, and yet I did not consider it. If you don’t like the taste of a bottle try cleaning with a sponge. My one litre bottle lives inside a neoprene sleeve so although it has been smashed about over the years it still has no scratches on it, despite hiking, climbing, via ferrata, conferences, work and more.



Forgetting to Track a Walk


Today I went through the motions of tracking the walk and I thought I had started the tracker but when I went to stop tracking as I arrived home I noticed that either I forgot, or I pressed the wrong button. Before the pandemic, and even slightly into the pandemic I would have been annoyed not to have a perfect record of my walks and activities. One and a half years into a pandemic I don’t care. I stopped using Strava because I grew tired of seeing who was ignoring common decency by not self-isolating locally.


I also do the same activities day after day, for years in a row. It isn’t interesting. There is no mystery. I also have no link with people doing group activities. People who do city things have returned to their old habits, but I see that group sports have not returned. The pandemic is still too volatile for things to be as they were.


Although I forgot to “track” my walk it is still logged as steps, heart beat and more. The effort is logged, but it’s not visual.

Taking a Break From The Apple Watch

Taking a Break From The Apple Watch

Byrichard

Yesterday I decided to take a break from the Apple watch for up to a week. I am tired of two behaviours. The first of these is the watch’s habit of saying that I did not stand for two or three hours in a row. I know that I have. I need to stand to cook, or to brush my teeth and other tasks. It also annoys me that if you bend your arm it counts that you sat down. Bend your arm to check if you have been standing for at least one minute and it resets the counter.


The second flaw comes from the monthly challenge. The challenge for this month is to do 4900 minutes of exercise if I remember and this is absurd. It will always push you to strive more, to reach further and to work out harder. It lacks flexibility.


If the workout goal is 4900 minutes, then that’s over two hours per day. In theory that’s a nice challenge, but in the long run it leads to exhaustion. Last year, I would let the app tell me to do up to 600 calories or more of exercise a day. That goal led to me exhausting and fatiguing myself because there are no breaks. It pushes, and pushes. It doesn’t think “You need to rest” or “you did sport A rather than sport B so we will adjust the monthly goal. It’s AI, without fatigue built in.


The other challenge, having three watches with three ecosystems. There is little to no interoperability. The steps aren’t transferred from Suunto to Apple from Apple to Suunto. Garmin wants other data than the other two. To feed all three databases you need to wear three watches. It would be nice to sync the data between the three without thought. This would give us the freedom to slide between platforms. This would give us the opportunity to wear a single watch.


Running Up Four Floors at a time, Walking Two Hours A Day


I almost never walk up the stairs, especially a single step at a time. I always run up them. I run up at least two steps at a time and I sprint three or four floors without getting winded. I also walk from one and a half to two hours a day. The Apple watch tells me that I didn’t stand for two hours in a row. If I don’t stand for one or two hours it is because I am studying or working. By telling me to stand the watch is telling me to procrastinate.


For clarity, the watch doesn’t tell me anything. I turn off notifications. I check the fitness app to see how the day is going, and that’s when I see that it says I haven’t stood for two hours. That little light blue bar annoys me. I have a compulsion to have a perfect collection of filled bars, every hour.


That’s why I need to take a break from the watch. It makes me care about something that doesn’t matter at all. Standing is a recommendation, for people who need to get into the habit of working out. I don’t have that problem. I can ignore it.


Turning It Off


I looked for an option to turn off the standing trend but can’t. I can cut it down to six hours a day, but the issue is not standing six or twelve hours a day. It’s wanting to have a “perfect” day, and keeping the trend in the fitness app increasing. This benefits my life in no way, so turning it off would be the ideal solution.

I Completed the Apple May Activity Challenge Yesterday
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I Completed the Apple May Activity Challenge Yesterday

Byrichard

I completed the Apple May Activity Challenge yesterday. The goal was to walk or run 349 kilometres within one month. I finished this challenge two days early.


Using the Apple Watch Series 3 and the SUUNTO Spartan Sport Wrist HR BARO I tracked all of my activities. For the first two or three weeks I tracked activities with both devices and then deleted the duplicates on Strava and then I stopped tracking with the Apple Watch as I saw that activity data could be communicated to Apple’s Activity tracking.


During the past month I walked 10-15 kilometres a day and when I didn’t walk such distances I was cycling. As a result I have had a sporty month. I’ve walked in the rain, the wind, and recently the heat. I took up running again and this provides me with an opportunity to play with a podcast, and to play with apps.


Running requires for my legs to adapt to the sport so I’m doing shorter distances than my cardiovascular system can cope with. I don’t want to feel knee pain so I’m doing less than I know I could. It’s about building up gradually, and eventually exceeding my previous best.


Now I have two days to recover, before the next challenge.

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Suunto and Wear OS

Byrichard

Suunto and Wear OS is a cultural shame. I like Suunto because it’s a European company with a European OS developed in Europe. It’s nice to buy their products because they’re reliable and hardly ever let me down. They’re also great because it’s European tech developers working together to create something interesting and reliable.


It’s not that I don’t like Google as a company. I do. I have liked Google since I first learned about them on my website’s visitor log. I only went from Android to iOS because DJI hated the Sony Xperia that I was using at the time. Without DJI I would still be an Android user.


Suunto devices have batteries that can last for weeks depending on how you use them. With the Suunto Spartan, I have now I charge it every few days and I can do a number of activities before I need to charge it. With the Apple Watch, I need to charge it every night. With the Suunto 7 the battery life is meant to last up to 48hrs. That’s down from 30 days with the previous OS on Spartan and Ambit 3 watches. The Suunto Device is yet another device that you need to charge every day.


What I like about Suunto’s own OS, what I like about a Sports tracker, rather than a smartwatch, is that you can use it for sports and choose which GPS precision you want for the battery to last for hours or even a day and a half of sports tracking.


By making Suunto 7 a smartwatch rather than a sports tracker you’re adding features that you don’t need. You don’t need to read e-mails, play music and other features. For that, you have Apple Watches and other city optimised smartwatches.


Suunto, with this move to WearOS, is going from a niche product maker with a core of dedicated users like me to a generalist company running as a “Haluamme tulla mukaan” (We want to be included in Finnish, according to Google Translate.)


Now to be a Google Fanboy. I prefer Google’s activity tracking via Android than Apple’s Move tracking. I like having a map of everywhere I’ve been and how much I’ve walked in a year. I also like that images I take are automatically geo-located in Google Photos. We’ll see how well the Suunto 7 plays with Google Fit.


I have had my Suunto Spartan Sport HR Baro since 2018 so I may upgrade in 2021 if I see a development that justifies upgrading. Currently, Suunto 7 is not an upgrade for me. It’s a lateral move simply to play with Google fit and a different map display. No support for external sensors in WearOS makes it uninteresting for cycling. For more information check this blog post.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BQ5nbmGtYA


The Apple Watch series 5 sells for 522 CHF whereas the Suunto 7 sells for 529 CHF so the difference in price is just 7 CHF at the moment of writing. If you need something that will survive real sports then I’d go for the Suunto 7. Both the Apple Watch Series 3 and Series 4 have scratches on them despite me not rock climbing and enjoying via ferrata with them as enthusiastically as with the Suunto Ambit 3.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CiGF1qBGKw


This advert mentions heat maps and there is one heat map that I haven’t been able to find yet. A walking/hiking heatmap. It would be great in countries where there is a culture of walking, to see where people walk most. We could look at the heatmap and find routes that we never thought of exploring.