Running Tech: A Whinge

I do a fair amount of running these days. More inside than out (there are hills and rain outside) and I have a few whinges about the tech I'm using on these runs.

Apple Watch Niggles

I'm deeply embedded in the Apple ecosystem, and in general I like it. Sadly the old Apple "it just works" philosophy is waning. Most of it works, but some key things are not as good as they could be.

Music is a mess.

I have a Series 8 cellular watch. It should be able to operate completely independently from a phone. I also do not subscribe to Apple Music, Spotify... any of the cloud providers (thats a whole other rant... I do however use iTunes Match to share my own library amongst my devices) so I like the fact that my watch has capacity to store music for listening to offline.

However, even though the watch can be used independently from a phone and offline, it's so heavily geared towards being connected to a phone or a network that the offline functionality often feels clunky and hidden or just simply assumes you are connected to some kind of network.

A couple of times I have started a run from my house and kicked off the workout and music, set off, got to the end of the drive only to find the music breaks up and then stops. A quick check and what I thought was my music playing from my Running playlist on using files on my watch, was actually my AirPods being connected to my phone in the house and my watch acting as a remote.

I've also had occasions where I have had to explicitly disconnect my watch from WiFi before setting out after again setting out and everything suddenly stopping. This time, I had made sure my AirPods were connected to my watch and not my phone, set off on the run only to realise the watch was not using the offline files, but using the WiFi to stream from iTunes Match. I had selected the Downloaded option in the Music app but it seemed to still favour streaming.

So I have learned that in order to go for a run and use my watch as a standalone, offline player I need to:

• Disconnect the WiFi
• Ensure my phone is nowhere near my watch or AirPods
• Go to Downloaded in the Music app on the watch and select the playlist from there.

Treadmill + Apple Watch = fail

I did a lot of running on my Treadmill and lost a few kilometres and minutes in times recorded due to the inaccuracy of the tech.

There is a lot of room for improvement here. Apple tend to like to hide a lot of settings, configuration etc. away and sell the "it just works" philosophy to you, which is great, until it doesn't.

If I run at about 9.6kph on my treadmill, then the Apple Watch is pretty accurate and will record my distance and time to within a few meters / seconds. I don't need super accurate results, so this for me is fine. The problem is I am now running at 11-13kph on a regular basis, or doing interval training on the treadmill and constantly speeding up and slowing down. As soon as I do either of those things, the Apple Watch is off by at least 250m and usually more like 750m-km. There is no way to adjust your figures in the fitness app, and there is no obvious way to calibrate or recalibrate your watch for indoor running. When you very first select Indoor Run on a new watch, it will tell you to go and run outside for 20 mins so it can calibrate itself, but then it never mentions it again.

It's annoying as I ran some very good times on my treadmill over the course of the month (24:01 was my best effort) and all of that data is lost when its uploaded to Strava. Strava is aware of the time but thinks I only ran 3.7km.

The other thing you cannot track so well (or at all) on a treadmill is the incline. My treadmill has 12 settings for incline and it can make a real difference to the effort you put in on the run, but there is no way to track it. The best you will get an increased heart rate so the watch will know you are working a bit harder.

I thought there must be some kit out there that I can augment my treadmill / watch with to enable me to track things more accurately indoors... enter the Runn Treadmill sensor from North Pole Engineering to solve all my problems. Oh...

The idea is that you mount this thing to your treadmill to make it smart. You configured by sticking some stickers to the belt so that its light sensor can pick up the belt speed, while its accelerometer can pick up on the incline. It takes all of this and feeds it to your watch / phone / device to augment your workout data. All for £77. Sounds too good to be true, right? Well... yeh.

This thing was awful. A cheap and nasty product all round. The build quality of the unit itself was flimsy, it still used a mini-USB jack and not USB-C, had no battery indicator... and then we get to the apps: a very poorly built configuration app called Configurez (the z on the end should have been the first red flag) to configure your Runn and an even worse app called Heartbeatz (there's that z again...) that is supposed to replace the Apple Fitness app while you run.

I set mine up and gave it a test when it arrived and initially all seemed well and despite the rough configuration app, I got it up and running in a few minutes and connected it to Zwift. I was looking forward to putting it to the test the next day on my next 5k.

Next day came and nothing worked. The connection dropped constantly, Zwift kept losing the connection, the Configurez app couldn't keep a connection alive either, restarting the device, apps, phone... nothing worked. I wasted 30 mins faffing with it before giving up.

I persevered and tried again the next day and decided to give the Heartbeatz app a go instead of Zwift and that cemented my decision to send this thing back. A terrible clone of the Fitness watch app that can't even count properly. First run I started launched a Run and started the timer at 3:45:00 and started counting down, then up... in short: do not buy one, more hassle than they are worth and don't provide a huge benefit.

Ultimately I think the answer is GymKit and a smart treadmill but that either means joining a Gym (no) or buying a smart treadmill (also no). For the amount that both of these things would set me back, I'll stick with innacurate readings. It's a bit annoying but honestly I'm just trying to stay fit, not break any records.

I would love to see indoor training given some love in future watchOS updates. I'm sure we can just throw AI at it and it will be fine... right?