Activity Tracking

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.

Activity trackers are designed for walking, running, canoeing and activities where you move your arms. Cycling is not one of those sports. Unless you’re cycling on a specialist bike that has handles you’ll be using your legs and your upper body will move very little. I have a workaround.

My workaround is to put the activity tracker in a pocket. In so doing it counts how many times a leg “steps” and your goal for the day is not missed. This is especially true when your goal is to take several thousand steps. Some would call it cheating but I call it thinking laterally.

For years now I have been tracking my sports activities with sports tracker on a variety of mobile phones, dive computers and sports tracking watches. I have gone canyoning, hiking, swimming, skiing, snowboarding, climbing, to do via ferrata, explored caves and trained indoors. In that time I have not had too many injuries and I have taken hundreds, if not thousands of photographs. [caption id=“attachment_2809” align=“aligncenter” width=“300”] I have tracked more than 1000 hours[/caption] These activities have been in France, Spain, Switzerland, Italy, England, Poland and maybe in or two countries that I have forgotten about. Sports tracking has progressed enormously since I started tracking activities. In the beginning I was using the N95 8gb and the battery lasted for about an hour. I then switched to various iphones and android devices before deciding that mobile phones were crap. That’s when I moved over to the Suunto Ambit 2 and later Suunto Ambit 3 devices. Since then I have been very happy tracking my physical activities. One key step was when Suunto and Sports tracker decided to share data between their services. At this moment I could track with the Suunto Ambit 3 and share to Sports tracker without four or six steps per activity. Since then the service has been reliable.