Introducing Activity Stats

Last Wednesday, April 29, 2020, Ian Blackburn tweeted a screenshot of his Total Apple Watch Activity numbers. He calculated the totals on a spreadsheet, by exporting the data from the Health app on his iPhone.

Ian’s data made me curious about my totals and it seemed really easy to put together an app for it. And so I started building Activity Stats. With all the work I have been doing with HealthKit in Tempo, it was really straightforward to get the data out of the Health app. My recent learning/playing with SwiftUI made it extremely fast and easy to put together a nice looking UI.

I shared the app with Ian and few other friends via TestFlight, and everyone found it interesting and thought it looked good. Even my 10 year old wanted it on her iPhone. That seemed adequate amount of validation for me to polish up and launch a quick v1.0 of the app. So today, 7 days after starting it as a brand new project in Xcode, I am excited to be releasing Activity Stats in the App Store! 🚀

Activity Stats is a simple app that displays your lifetime totals of various types of fitness and workout data stored in the Health app on your iPhone. Here's the list of totals it currently supports,

• Total active calories

• Total exercise time

• Total steps count

• Total walking and running distance

• Total walking and running distance

• Total walking distance from workouts

• Total swimming distance

• Total cycling distance

• Total indoor cycling time

• Total elliptical time

• Total workout time

• Total workouts

Activity Stats is available for free in the App Store. If you are curious about your totals, please do check it out.

Battery Performance of Apple Watch in a Marathon

On Sunday, October 13, I ran the 2019 Chicago Marathon with an Apple Watch Series 5. This is a quick report on how well the watch battery performed.

TL;DR: Apple Watch Series 5 used only 50% battery over a full marathon distance, ran in 3:53:25.

⚡️ 50%   ⏱ 3:53:25   🏃‍♂️ 26.2 miles

Apple Watch Setup

• Series 5, 40mm in Titanium, with ‪watchOS 6.0.1‬
• Untethered — ran without tethered iPhone
• Cellular was Off
• Theater Mode was On‬
• Used the Workout app to track the run
• Power Saving Mode for the Workout app was Off
• No streaming audio — no music or podcast was played
• Water Lock was On

Total Run Duration

• 3 hours, 53 minutes, and 25 seconds

Total Run Distance

• 26.2 miles
• Distance tracked by the Workout app: 26.91 miles (See Notes below)

Battery Used: 50%

• Only 50% battery was used to run a full marathon
• 96% charge before start
• 46% charge at the finish

Battery at 96% before start

Battery at 46% after finish

Notes

• [7:15 AM] Kept the watch powered down until 15 minutes before the race officially started.
• [7:18 AM] On startup, battery was at 99%, I tapped on the Weather complication to refresh. That seemed to take too long (couple of minutes), so I immediately turned off WiFi and Cellular. Battery was now at 97%, probably from the network call trying to refresh weather.
• [7:20 AM] Turned On theater mode about 10 minutes before the race started. Bad idea, because it got tricky to wake up the watch display and start a workout with gloves on. Yes, that was me standing past the start line to start a workout 🤪. I usually put it in theater mode after starting a run. Never go off script during a race.
• [7:45 AM] I crossed the start line at 15 minutes past official start time. About 45K runners run the Chicago marathon every year, so the race is started in waves with different corrals of runners.
• [7:45 AM] The watch had been on now for about 30 minutes, and in theater mode for about 25 minutes, at 96%.
• With Power Saving Mode for the Workout app disabled, Apple Watch tracked the heart rate with the built-in sensor through out the run. But with Theater Mode On and Cellular Off, it essentially utilized 2 out of the 3 techniques that the Workout app's Power Saving Mode uses.
• Turning Theater Mode On disabled always-on display, and required tapping the screen everytime I wanted to view my running data (pace, distance, etc) in progress. I am used to this, because I have been using the same setup during my long runs for the past year, with Apple Watch Series 4.
• Workout app reported final distance to be 26.91 miles vs the official 26.2 miles. The additional distance of 0.71 miles is pretty normal for most of the tracking devices at such long-distance races due to reasons like erratic GPS signal around tall city buildings, or turns and curves adding up.

Marathon Ready

I have been training for and running marathons with Apple Watch since it launched in 2015. In total, I have run 6 marathons with Apple Watch(es), at least one marathon with every year’s model. There is no question on how well can the Apple Watch handle marathon training and racing. With only 50% battery utilization for an almost 4-hour marathon run, Apple Watch is an extremely versatile and powerful fitness device that no runner should ignore.

Here’s my marathon run in Tempo