A Fitness Discussion with MyAI about Silos, Running, Cycling, and Strava

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Years ago we had bulky GPS watches that we wore only when we were hiking or doing sports. They only tracked our speed, location, and elevation. With time they were made less hideous and more socially acceptable. We could go from wearing them when doing sports, to when doing nothing.

With time wrist HR monitoring and step counters were added and so these devices added to the quantified self habit. They counted how much we walked, how long we were still, and how how heart was doing for the entire day.

Companies like Apple and Google gameified our quantified self. You must stand for one minute an hour. You must be active for half an hour a day. You must burn 300 kcals per day. They went from watches that we could wear just when we were doing sports, to watches that quantified our activities 24/7. With gameificiation they almost forced us to wear their devices to feed their data silos.

Garmin has its silo. Suunto has another, and Apple has a third. The result is that, in theory, if you have devices for all three brands you need to wear all three devices simultaneously to feed each data silo.

In reality Suunto is happy to get data from the Apple watch via Sportstracker and it’s just as happy to get a workout file from Garmin. In essence Suunto is the ‘silo’ that is friendliest with external data, which makes it one of the most interesting. The interest comes from having the flexibility to wear a Garmin, Apple or Suunto device. All of them can be ingested.

With Garmin, if you import a GPX file it will log the distance, and other metrics, but will not count fatigue and other variables. It reserves certain metrics to its own sources.

Apple is the most paradoical of all. You buy an expensive phone, and then you buy an expensive watch that lasts for one day, before needing a charge. If you buy the SE charging is slower than if you buy the more “luxurious” models.

The paradox with Apple comes from it ingesting data from Suunto, from Garmin, and from other sources, but refusing to use that data for the fitness app. This is especially absurd since it actually has all of our fitness data. They want to force us to use an Apple watch.

Fitness and Freshness

Apps such as Strava, Garmin, Suunto and Fitness all quantify our fitness. It counts our walks, our runs, our climbs, our skateboarding, our cycling, our hiking and more. It then tells us how hard we worked and how fatigued we are.

The issue is that this information is siloed by each brand. This means that if you work out for four months with Apple, and then wear a Garmin for two days, then your Apple fitness will drop, because you were inactive, and Garmin will say “You’re overdoing it, consider resting” because of the leap from zero activity to some activity.

These watches all track fitness and freshness in their own silos, so if you slide between Apple for three days, and then suunto for two, and Garmin for one, let’s say because you walked with Apple, ran with Suunto, and cycled with Garmin, then each app sees a different fitness picture. It’s only by wearing your device(s) full time that you get a full picture, and not just full time, but for weeks, months or even years for an accurate evaluation of fatigue and exhaustion.

On the Topic of Sports Related fatigue

With Strava you can look at Fitness and Freshness overall, as well as by sport, whether running, swimming, or other. If you’re willing to pay for Strava Premium, then you can look at this data, whilst being platform independent, since data from Suunto, Garmin, Apple and many other sources is aggregated. The more data you add, the more complete the image. In essence you can track with a single device at a time, and get a good oversight, once you pay for premium.

The Apple Silo

The paradox is that Strava and Apple both have acess to the same user data, but whereas Apple chooses only to use its own data, Strava uses everyone’s data. If Apple opened up the Fitness App then it would compete directly with Strava for that niche.

In reality Suunto and Sportstracker are in a good position to compete with Strava and the Apple Fitness app because of how easy it is to import data from multiple sources. The key drawback is that it is a manual, rather than automated process, for now.

Why Would you Have Multiple Devices

There are people who go for a bike ride wearing an Apple watch. Other people who do a lot of hiking might have a Garmin Instinct or a Garmin Instinct 2. I use this device as an example because it’s cheap. Others might have a Garmin Fenix 7 or 7s because they have the budget and they buy one device every few years, so it’s justifiable to splurge. I noticed that one or three people use the Suunto App directly.

Others have Wahoo, Garmin, Cateye or other cycling specific devices that they use for navigation and climb information. That’s why I upgraded from an Explore to an Explore 2. Over time, as you switch devices you might switch brands, and that’s when you’re across two or more silos, and that’s when you have to decide whether to start from scratch or straddle two or more ecosystems. Tools exist to help you merge, in theory, but if that then propagates then you might end up with hundreds, or thousands of duplicates, with no practical way of tidying up.

And Finally

My Apple Watch SE battery was so depleted a few months ago that it became unusable. Luckily I noticed when it was protected by Apple Care+ so replacing the battery was free. The side effect is that now the watch should be alive and well for another two or more years, hence having to decide which devices to prioritise.

In Conlusion

I know that “and finally” and “in Conclusion” are the same thing but I feel like embelishing. For a long time we used GPS watches as GPS watches, but with time, as they tracked the quantified self, and fitness progression so the need for complete data grew. That’s why wearing three watches simultaneously stops being absurd and starts being logical. The issue is that when we slide between platforms we lose continuity if we don’t wear devices A, B, and C. That’s where Strava give us the flexibility to slide between platforms, without losing the geostationary satellite view of our fitness progression.

It is absurd to wear two or three watches, but if the data is siloed, then either we’re eccentric, or we depend on paywall features from apps like Strava.