I wish I could say more about how the new watch is working out now that I’ve had a chance to use it for a few more weeks, but…it’s been a chaotic time. Immediately after the last post, I went to visit my mom for the holidays for a while, and slept on a cot that was rather uncomfortable. And then, as soon as I got home I caught a bad cold, which I’m still recovering from. The result is that the stats the watch has collected for sleep states and breathing disturbances are just all over the place, thanks to a lot of shifting around uncomfortably and coughing up a lung. Hopefully things should return to normal soon and then I can start seeing stable data.
I am trying to start doing long walks regularly again though, and here I ran into a bit of a conflict. I’ve previously used the Runmeter app to collect data for these walks, and I’m still using it since it collects a lot more detail than the built-in workout tracking does. The built-in workout tracking does by default try and detect when you’ve started a walk though, and pops up with a “hey, do you want to track this as a workout session?” prompt even when I’ve already got Runmeter going.
For a couple of times I figured I’d let it do so since hey, the more data the better. But, then at the end of the walk I now have two apps I have to toggle off on the fiddly little watch interface. The built-in workout app also struggles a bit to decide on exactly when the walk started — it’ll look back in time to try and figure out when the walk started, but it was often off by 5-6 minutes, probably counting a bunch of stuff like walking around in the apartment and getting dressed for outdoors, putting on shoes, etc. as part of the walk. I could manually start the built-in workout at the right time, but honestly, it wasn’t really adding anything of value that Runmeter wasn’t already tracking, so I just disabled the automatic start detection of the built-in workout app. The ‘exercise’ portion of the daily ring tracking increases whether it gets formally logged as a workout or not anyway.