In fitness, and in life, we aspire to be our best. The competition is not with anyone else, but a life-long pursuit of improving and pushing our own personal limits. This gets even more focussed for all of us everyday athletes, who log workouts day in, day out, at odd hours, for weeks, months, and years. It’s mostly driven by the joy of running, but over time, we also start appreciating the game of self-discipline to chase the next level of self-improvement. Seeing those times drop, on a race day, or just on a casual training day, is more gratifying than any race medals. Unlocking a new Personal Best is a badge of self-fulfillment, accomplished with relentless commitment to self-discipline. It’s the glorious part of all the hard work that deserves a celebration alongside the daily log of healthy living.

Personal Bests has been one of the oldest on the list of most requested features for Tempo. While it seems fairly straightforward at a surface level, implementing it locally on the device (vs taking all of our fitness data to a server) made this feature complex enough that I have had a few planning/design iterations for a couple of years now. So I am really excited to be finally releasing it.

The FAQ covers all the details of Personal Bests for easier reference. Here is a quick summary.

Tempo identifies and showcases PB times from 100 meters to 26.2 miles. Each Personal Best is calculated in 2 steps,

1. An initial scan identifies PB by comparing average pace of every workout.

2. Tempo then goes further by analyzing every data sample from every workout to aggregate the fastest times from 100m to 26.2. This is the key step to identify the most accurate (and real) fastest times. Imagine running a fast mile within a 5K workout that you walked for the second half. The average pace of that workout might not reveal that you ran your life’s best 1mi performance ever. By aggregating individual data samples within every workout Tempo can detect these interim fastest time segments.

In addition, Step 2 above also enables Tempo to highlight fastest times for every workout—a new section in the Workout Details. This section further allows interacting with the fastest time segments on a map and graphs, highlighted just for the selected fast time.

One of the challenges with analyzing data samples is the accuracy of each data sample. These data samples are short distances (few meters in length) with start and end timestamps, and are recorded by sensors (like GPS) of the workout tracking device (Apple Watch). Sometimes this data can be inaccurate (GPS glitches, etc), and result in impossibly fast time segments. Tempo addresses this by providing options to filter paces that are unattainably faster based on following 2 options,

1. World Records option filters everything faster than current world record for the given distance.

2. Tempo Pace Thresholds is a custom (and a very generous) fastest time estimator for various distances. This is based on your training data (and fitness level) and updates with your fitness level.

And if the above filtering options still misses any inaccurate data, Tempo also has the ability to mark individual Personal Best Records, or an entire workout, to be ignored from the Personal Bests list.

A lot of us have been running for decades, and possibly have some of our PB times that happened before we started using Apple Health to track all the fitness data. If that’s you, you can manually log a workout with that time for Tempo to showcase, and track it.

Enjoy, and Happy Chasing that Next PB! 🏅