Apple’s New Focus on Running
With WatchOS 9, and the Apple Watch Ultra, the company has made it clear that it's taking running, and fitness in general, more seriously
On September 7, Apple announced their latest watch hardware, the Series 8, an updated Series SE, and the all new Ultra model. While the new hardware is getting most of the attention, in reality, they are iterative upgrades from the last years model. As a runner, I think I’m most excited about the software upgrades they’ve put out in WatchOS 9, which has got me interested in using an Apple Watch for my runs again. This comes as a free upgrade for watches as early as the Series 4 (2018), as well as iOS 16 and the updated fitness app. This is a runner’s perspective of these latest updates.
WatchOS 9 Fitness Upgrades
Prior to WatchOS 9, the workout app was a little underwhelming especially for runners coming from a fitness watch like a Garmin. We got basic metrics like pace, distance, and heart rate. However, in the latest software update, the fitness app will now report additional metrics like heart rate zones, running power, cadence, splits and segments, and elevation data. These are super helpful in monitoring your performance during the run, but even more interesting to review after a workout (more on that later).
For runners, the outdoor run workout can be customized to set up custom workout sessions to have a more guided workout. If you want to do interval training, you can set up a custom 4 x 400m workout (or whatever distance you like) and really customize a training session.
In addition, athletes can now set up alerts to help them stay in the right training zone. In my latest run, I setup a heart rate alert to inform me when I dip below 130bpm, or go above 155bpm. When you fall out of this, a voice prompt in addition to Taptic cues comes up to let you know that you’re outside of your target zone. This can be set up for pace, heart rate, cadence, power, and time. Split alerting continues to be offered but now can be customized to alert at a desired distance instead of the standard mile marker. While other devices offer similar alerting, I really enjoyed the voice prompts telling me the alert rather than me trying to guess if a beep was for an alert or a mile segment.
In pace, cadence, and power alerting, you can set a target or a range. In target mode, you provide a fixed metric, such as a 9 minute mile pace and alerts will come up when you’re not at that mark. In a range mode, you provide an upper and lower limit and the watch will let you know when you’re outside of this target range.
Heart rate alerting works similar to the range alert. You can select to target one of your heart rate zones, or provide a custom range to stay in. The watch will monitor your heart rate and provide a notification when you fall below or go over the desired range.
In the time alerts, the watch will give you a notification at the time interval you’ve setup. For example, you can set an alert to go off every 5 minutes, which can be useful if you want to do time based intervals where you go hard for 5 minutes, and then easy for another 5.
While the new workout app and faces is a big upgrade for runners using the Apple Watch, one area it still fall behinds in is the customizability of the workout watch faces. We’re limited to just have a few faces and are limited to just a few layout options provided by Apple. For those coming from other platforms, this will feel lacking on first try. However, after a few runs with the latest update, I’ve come to like the simplicity and easy to read layouts of the data points that one can browse by scrolling the digital crown. I do miss having dedicated buttons and dealing with the digital crown to navigate screens isn’t very intuitive while running.
iOS Fitness App
Another big upgrade this year in the Apple health space is in their Fitness app, which is used to view your workout data. While from the home view, not much seems to have changed (other than the added metrics for running power), the added details in the Show More sections are very much welcomed.
Workout Details
The workout details now provides an interactive graph to help you analyze your performance after a workout. Two views are provided - All and 15 minutes. In both views, you can see a break down of your data for:
Elevation
Heart Rate
Pace
Power
Cadence
Vertical Oscillation
Ground Contact Time
Stride Length
With in the All View, you can see the changes in effort and performance for the duration of the entire workout. A touch and hold gesture brings up a cursor where you can slide along the graphs, comparing the metrics across time. A dot follows along in the map to tell you where you were on the route at that moment.
In the 15 minute view, the graphs are zoomed in to 15 minute segments, allowing for a a more granular review of your performance. Within the map, the 15 minute section of your workout is highlighted. Similar to the all view, you can also touch and hold to bring a cursor to skim through that given section, with a dot following on the map to showcase where you were in the route at that given moment.
Splits View
Splits view doesn’t see too much change from previous versions, but the average metrics per split for power and cadence are now presented here
Heart Rate View
The heart rate details received some updates too, giving a “time in zone” summary view after your workout. This can be super helpful for those focused on zone based training help inform you when you may have been pushing too hard or not hard enough
Thoughts on this update
All in all, I think these are amazing upgrades from Apple. After 9 generations of Apple Watch updates, I’m glad that fitness and running is getting some new attention from the company. I do agree that they still have a long way to go before the are on par with the offerings from other companies like Garmin, however these latest updates show that they are headed in the right direction to be a strong competitor. Depending on your needs, this may already be true today. Personally, I’m excited to see what comes out of this from all companies. I’m excited to see Apple advance their fitness tech even further, but also would like to see what comes out from the other companies to continue to remain competitive.
As for me, will I switch to the Apple ecosystem? I’m already a heavy user of the Apple Watch and love their workouts with Apple Fitness+. I’ve only really ditched them for running because there were better tools out there to track my runs. I currently trust my Garmin for its accuracy and reliability during training and racing. With that said, this software update is much more promising and has me considering the switch to rely on fewer devices and unify my data in Apple’s Health app.
While I am happy with this software update, before I decide to ditch my Garmin and switch my runs to Apple, I will need to see how the actual hardware compares. I’ve got an Apple Watch Ultra on order and plan to test it against my Garmin Forerunner 945 LTE to see which is best for me. I’m primarily interested to see it’s GPS accuracy as that was the top driver for me to switch to Garmin the first place.
If you’re interested in a comparison post (or video), let me know and I’ll see what I can share about those.