Introducing Goals

“It always seems impossible until it’s done.”

— Nelson Mandela

Last year, when I was working on Tempo 3, I had a bunch of features on the roadmap that I wanted to build and launch with Tempo 3. As I scoped out work for each of those features, a lot of them turned out to be big enough to be an app in itself. I won’t list all of the yet-to-be-released features, but two of those features were Personal Bests and Goals. Personal Bests was released earlier this year, and today Tempo v3.4.0 is launching with Goals! 🎉

Goals in Tempo is built around the idea of completing a total distance by doing one or more workouts. Goals can be great in keeping motivation high to maintain a consistent training routine, chase a new fitness peak, or do both!

Tempo’s goal setup is simple and fast, and tracking is fully automated. A goal can be setup to run, walk, or hike a total distance once over a set number of days, or repeat weekly or monthly.

Our workouts are only a fraction of the time throughout the day/week, but having a goal as a constant reminder really helps with the motivation to show up for the next workout and maintain that forward momentum. So Goals in Tempo are built to be everywhere,

• On your Home Screen with beautiful goals widgets

• On your favorite Apple Watch face with a goal complication

• And in Tempo app on your iPhone and Apple Watch

That’s Goals in a nutshell. I hope you enjoy it and it helps you achieve your future training and fitness goals! 🎯🙌👏

Try Tempo for free!

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Thank you!

I want to take a moment and say thanks. As I said above, every key feature in Tempo could be a standalone app in itself. All the work—iOS app, watchOS app, widgets, complications, synching, and more—requires a lot of time and effort. Tempo’s promise of privacy and attention to detail to bring it all together is what makes it so great for all of us. It’s insightful, motivating, and reliable. We are also in the early days of making it sustainable and long-lasting, and your support helps immensely. Thank you for being part of building our favorite training app!

Introducing Personal Bests

“There is No Finish Line.”

— Nike

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! 🏅

Try Tempo for free!

Introducing Heart Rate Zones

One of the key ingredients of training well is heart rate, and more specifically heart rate zones. Heart rate zones can be really useful in targeting and understanding the effort type of every workout.

There is a lot of great information about heart rate based training on the web, so we won't get too much into that here. But here's a quick primer: running pace from warmup to sprinting hard usually aligns across different heart rate zones. Heart rate is the primary factor that drives performance, and each heart rate zone is a range with lower and upper threshold based on the percentage of the maximum heart rate. Maximum heart rate itself varies based on factors like age, genetics, fitness, and more. Heart rate zones are termed differently depending on the context/type of training. Generally speaking, there are 5 zones like warmup, maintain fitness, aerobic, anaerobic, and extreme. Each zone requires incrementally harder effort to maintain, and we can sustain working out for much longer at lower zones (lower heart rate range) vs higher zones.

When I started building this feature in Tempo, I knew it would require the ability to change the maximum heart rate, but I quickly realized that it needed to go further into personalization. Tempo's heart rate zones implementation is super configurable to match any athlete's general fitness profile as well as training goals. It enables following options,

• Edit upper and lower limit for each heart rate zone
• Edit name of each heart rate zone
• Multiple naming schemes for heart rate zones
• And of course, the ability to edit maximum heart rate

I am really glad how this turned out. I believe Tempo is the first iOS app for runners to provide such an extensive level of customization for heart rate based training.

Try Tempo for free!

Tempo 3: The Beginning of a New Tempo

“It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.”

— Confucius

More powerful, in a stunning new design.

This year has been anything but normal, and when I started the work on Tempo 3 earlier this year, I had no idea how far I would get, or when I would be able to ship it.

Tempo 3 is based on following:

• Feedback and feature requests from many runners already using Tempo

• My own wishlist as a runner

• Apple technology updates—code level, UI/UX level, and generally in iOS

I feel a little embarrassed to admit how many different lists I have made to structure this work. There’s just so much to do, but what I can tell you is that this is just the beginning of what you are seeing.

A few weeks ago, when I looked at the roadmap of macro items for Tempo 3, I felt a little defeated because it seemed I had hardly scratched the surface. But that despair feeling slowly faded into joy after I had to spend time with v2.12.1 again for a bit. I have been using Tempo 3 for so long and so much now, that I had stopped noticing how far we have come. The excitement has grown more over the last week as everything came together for the release, and so many beta testers sent their comments on how amazing the app was looking. I must call out here that I feel really fortunate to have a great group of runners as beta testers for Tempo. Their feedback and reporting bugs has made this release possible. 🙏

It’s 8:48 PM ET on October 14 right now. My plan is to do a phased release of Tempo tonight and test everything before releasing it for everyone tomorrow. And I just started writing this post. Add to that the hours of sleepless weekends and weekdays over last couple of weeks while working on brand new App Store screenshots, press kit, Tempo’s homepage, and a lot of other launch items, I feel a little exhausted. So I am going to make this post short by leaving you with some quick highlights about this release.

If you are really curious about the details of this release, you should checkout the following. It’s pretty much a brand new app, and every part describing the app has been redone and helpful to learn from.

• App Store listing and screenshots

• Release Notes

• New FAQ for Tempo (still a work in progress, but hey, we finally have one!)

• New homepage for Tempo

• Press Kit

• What’s New and App Intro screens in the app. You can launch them from the About section of the app settings

• Oh yeah, and the entire app itself! :)

Here are the highlights:

• The work-in-progress version for this effort was set to 2.14 over the summer, so Tempo 3 work was appropriately codenamed Project Valentine.

• We have a brand new UI and the primary change is switching to the standard San Francisco font family. When I initially finished updating the entire app with SF, I felt super guilty for not doing it earlier, and worse that it had to wait longer. I am sorry.

• I had been procrastinating on switching the font to SF for a while now, but with iOS 14 Widgets it was obvious. There’s no way I was shipping Tempo widgets with custom font for everyone’s Home Screen. And you can’t go from widgets in SF to app in Avenir Next.

• The primary driver for the new workout details screen was scalability in the structure and layout. There’s a lot more data that’s in the works that will end up here, but it’s already looking so 😍.

• The new custom date range option for the now new Trends started last winter and has been living on a branch all this time.

• Adding a workout manually is something that has been finished and ready since last January, but I didn’t ship it because if you added a workout say 5 years before your first workout in the Health app (I did that to add a PR marathon from 2009), it would instantly make the Trends useless. So this feature had to wait until we had custom trends date selection options.

• I had at least 3 different folks reach out to me asking about how Intensity Calendar’s circles worked. One of them is a founding Tempo customers. He was frustrated, because the calculations didn’t make sense for his data. We did a few e-mail exchanges, and with that feedback it was obvious to me that I needed to do better with this functionality. The updates to Intensity Calendar is a result of the collaboration with him. Very grateful for his patience and help on this.

• I was bummed to not be able to release Tempo 3 on day one of iOS 14 arrival. Part of me was hoping that iOS 14 won’t come out until the new iPhone 12. (Not bad for that estimate, we are launching just a day before iPhone 12 pre-orders.) But it was a blessing in disguise—I took a step back, assessed what needed to be done, trimmed some scope, without shredding it, and really got to finish some quality work that I wanted done for this launch.

• My plan was to get the app submitted for review last Friday on Oct 9, but that didn’t happen, and I was still at it on Sunday Oct 11th. This Sunday in October is usually the marathon Sunday for me. In a normal year, I would be running in the streets of Chicago. This year it ended up being “get Tempo to the App Store” marathon. I made it to the finish line in the evening. Thanks to the App Store review team, Tempo was also approved later that night!

My special thanks to Stephanie, who has been a great beta tester and also helped with getting the FAQ going.

I guess this post isn’t as short as I expected. Time to go do some launch testing. :)

2.6.2: A Tribute to the Marathon Distance

“ If you want to run, run a mile. If you want to experience a different life, run a marathon. ”

— Emil Zátopek

For many runners, marathon distance is sacred. To run a marathon, we can't fake through the training, and even when the training buildup goes perfectly, anything can happen on race day. A subtle variation from our plan on race day can have magnifying disastrous effects on our performance and experience. A lot of such critical variables are not even in our control to begin with. Running a marathon is a journey that changes us in so many ways. It’s such a unique lifetime experience that many of us find ourselves allured by the numbers 26.2 and 13.1 — the full and half marathon distance in miles.

iOS 13.1 instantly brought out the above intrigue in me. Without any specific plan around the release numbers, Tempo ended up being at 2.6.0 for iOS 13.0 launch. As iOS quickly went to 13.1, and Tempo was just .2 shy of 2.6.2, it felt like meant to be to ignore. So as a tribute to the marathon distance, Tempo has been updated to version 2.6.2 for iOS 13.1.✨

I wanted to do something simple and quick, but special for this one, so I picked up another version of dark mode theme. It was scrapped in favor of what we currently have as the default dark mode. After spending some time on it, to my surprise, the result is a beautiful new theme that we are calling Deep Blue. The name is still tentative for this one, we considered Blue Medal, Endurance Blue, Magic Blue, but for now Deep Blue it is. Please feel free to send your suggestions for the name.

There are also a couple of important bug fixes and enhancements, but I am really glad that we got this beautiful new dark mode theme in Deep Blue for this release. The fact that the theme was almost scrapped makes it special in its own way.

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