Recently Strava added MCP AI decorations, with the idea of making workout feedback more interesting and dynamic. In practice when Garmin Suunto and Runna did that they forgot a key aspect. Allowing humans to add real context.
AI is a guessing algorithm, not true intelligence. It will look at data, but it won’t understand it. It will only correlate it to other data and provide a guess according to other contextual information.
Over the last week or two I tested the Garmin ForeRunner 570 when navigating from Crans-Montana to Leukerbad. I also tried a group run navigating with the 570 during a Décathlon run, before spotting that the Coros Nomad and Coros Apex 4 offered full map navigation without paying the Garmin premium price.
Hiking with the 570 is a red line on a black line. You look at the squiggle and intuit where you’re meant to go. With hiking it worked most of the time, although in one or two situations context would have been nice to have. In the second I was running with a group as unofficial navigator. I had the red line helping me intuit where the track was and I got it right.
Yesterday I woke up feeling tired and both Garmin and Apple said that I neded to rest. What I thought were allergies turned out to be a one day cold, I hope. According to the Apple Watch my HRV crashed down and in the evening I definitely had a cold/flu dream.
My dream, paradoxically, was sorting through a list of photos via checksum or some other technology. What I spent my waking hours doing made it into my dreams.
I like Garmin Connect and the Garmin Instinct 2. Both the app, and the device are good and they’re reliable for tracking sports on a daily basis. Having said this, I felt the urge to slide back to my Suunto devices and the Suunto app. For many, many, many years I was very happy with suunto getting two dive computers, one feature watch an ambit 2, ambit 3, Suunto Spartan and Peak 5.
The Garmin Connect End of year summary is currently available, and updating daily. The stats are quite interesting,
Despite cycling as much as I did Garmin says that I took 3.8 million steps this year and that in March I took 486,000 steps. That’s when I was hiking a lot.
I logged 457 activities, of which 233 walking, 154 cycling and 36 running. I logged 741h and 58 minutes of sports. According to the app I travelled 8919km which is cycling to Paris from London 18 times. The biggest bike ride was 148 kilometres and the month where I travelled furthest was 1691.8km.
Garmin connect isn’t as smart as I thought. I thought that if I used the Explore 2 with a heart rate belt, that I would get training status and training readiness. For a week I was tracking with the Explore 2 as my primary tracker. Data is missing.
It’s a shame that it doesn’t work as expected because if I could wear a normal watch while cycling, rather than the instinct 2, then I would avoid tracking the same workout twice.
There was a time, for decades, if not centuries, when a watch provided us with the time. We would wear it in a pocket, attached to a chain, we would stare up at a clock tower and we would see the time. We might even hear church bells to indicate every quarter, half and full hour. In the last decade we have gone from wearing watches to tell time, to watches that quantify us.
Since Strava has decided to sue Garmin, and since Suunto has decided to sue Garmin as well, for different reasons, I feel now is a good opportunity to remind ourselves of how to upload to Garmin and Strava manually.
If you record an activity with a Garmin device, you can navigate to connect.garmin.com, log in and go to the activity. You can export file, TCX or GPX. I usually export the file, double click, and then use the .fit file to upload to Strava. You can add a name, photos etc.
In the 2000s I was using a Nokia N95 8gb with Sports tracker to track my walks every day. Eventually, when I started scuba diving I switched to Suunto to track dives, and eventually wore one for hikes, and then I upgraded to the Suunto Ambit 2, 3, Spartan Wrist HR Baro and then the Peak 5.
At the same time as I was jumping from one watch to another Sports Tracker was growing, and then Suunto bought it, and it became Movescount and this app was truly fantastic. I really loved the web app. It then became the Suunto App. Sports Tracker and the Suunto App are iterations of the same app. The Sports tracker app plays nicely with the Apple Watch, among other apps, whereas the Suunto app plays nicely with Suunto and Xiaomi devices.
It is irrational and absurd for Strava to sue one of its’ most important providers of data, Garmin. Every run, hike, climb and other sport that I have done for years comes from either Suunto, Garmin, Apple Watch or another brand. Garmin is huge in the cycling community.
I see people with Garmin devices, wahoo devices and more. People like me have a cycling computer, and a sports tracking wrist watch. With these devices we track our workouts. We automatically feed that data into Strava. Strava is the third party, not Garmin. Garmin is the source of the data that Strava is making money from. Without Garmin, Suunto and more, Strava would be a mediocre tracking app with little to track power and more.