A Fitness Discussion with MyAI about Silos, Running, Cycling, and Strava

Years ago we had bulky GPS watches that we wore only when we were hiking or doing sports. They only tracked our speed, location, and elevation. With time they were made less hideous and more socially acceptable. We could go from wearing them when doing sports, to when doing nothing.

With time wrist HR monitoring and step counters were added and so these devices added to the quantified self habit. They counted how much we walked, how long we were still, and how how heart was doing for the entire day.

Companies like Apple and Google gameified our quantified self. You must stand for one minute an hour. You must be active for half an hour a day. You must burn 300 kcals per day. They went from watches that we could wear just when we were doing sports, to watches that quantified our activities 24/7. With gameificiation they almost forced us to wear their devices to feed their data silos.

Garmin has its silo. Suunto has another, and Apple has a third. The result is that, in theory, if you have devices for all three brands you need to wear all three devices simultaneously to feed each data silo.

In reality Suunto is happy to get data from the Apple watch via Sportstracker and it’s just as happy to get a workout file from Garmin. In essence Suunto is the ‘silo’ that is friendliest with external data, which makes it one of the most interesting. The interest comes from having the flexibility to wear a Garmin, Apple or Suunto device. All of them can be ingested.

With Garmin, if you import a GPX file it will log the distance, and other metrics, but will not count fatigue and other variables. It reserves certain metrics to its own sources.

Apple is the most paradoical of all. You buy an expensive phone, and then you buy an expensive watch that lasts for one day, before needing a charge. If you buy the SE charging is slower than if you buy the more “luxurious” models.

The paradox with Apple comes from it ingesting data from Suunto, from Garmin, and from other sources, but refusing to use that data for the fitness app. This is especially absurd since it actually has all of our fitness data. They want to force us to use an Apple watch.

Fitness and Freshness

Apps such as Strava, Garmin, Suunto and Fitness all quantify our fitness. It counts our walks, our runs, our climbs, our skateboarding, our cycling, our hiking and more. It then tells us how hard we worked and how fatigued we are.

The issue is that this information is siloed by each brand. This means that if you work out for four months with Apple, and then wear a Garmin for two days, then your Apple fitness will drop, because you were inactive, and Garmin will say “You’re overdoing it, consider resting” because of the leap from zero activity to some activity.

These watches all track fitness and freshness in their own silos, so if you slide between Apple for three days, and then suunto for two, and Garmin for one, let’s say because you walked with Apple, ran with Suunto, and cycled with Garmin, then each app sees a different fitness picture. It’s only by wearing your device(s) full time that you get a full picture, and not just full time, but for weeks, months or even years for an accurate evaluation of fatigue and exhaustion.

On the Topic of Sports Related fatigue

With Strava you can look at Fitness and Freshness overall, as well as by sport, whether running, swimming, or other. If you’re willing to pay for Strava Premium, then you can look at this data, whilst being platform independent, since data from Suunto, Garmin, Apple and many other sources is aggregated. The more data you add, the more complete the image. In essence you can track with a single device at a time, and get a good oversight, once you pay for premium.

The Apple Silo

The paradox is that Strava and Apple both have acess to the same user data, but whereas Apple chooses only to use its own data, Strava uses everyone’s data. If Apple opened up the Fitness App then it would compete directly with Strava for that niche.

In reality Suunto and Sportstracker are in a good position to compete with Strava and the Apple Fitness app because of how easy it is to import data from multiple sources. The key drawback is that it is a manual, rather than automated process, for now.

Why Would you Have Multiple Devices

There are people who go for a bike ride wearing an Apple watch. Other people who do a lot of hiking might have a Garmin Instinct or a Garmin Instinct 2. I use this device as an example because it’s cheap. Others might have a Garmin Fenix 7 or 7s because they have the budget and they buy one device every few years, so it’s justifiable to splurge. I noticed that one or three people use the Suunto App directly.

Others have Wahoo, Garmin, Cateye or other cycling specific devices that they use for navigation and climb information. That’s why I upgraded from an Explore to an Explore 2. Over time, as you switch devices you might switch brands, and that’s when you’re across two or more silos, and that’s when you have to decide whether to start from scratch or straddle two or more ecosystems. Tools exist to help you merge, in theory, but if that then propagates then you might end up with hundreds, or thousands of duplicates, with no practical way of tidying up.

And Finally

My Apple Watch SE battery was so depleted a few months ago that it became unusable. Luckily I noticed when it was protected by Apple Care+ so replacing the battery was free. The side effect is that now the watch should be alive and well for another two or more years, hence having to decide which devices to prioritise.

In Conlusion

I know that “and finally” and “in Conclusion” are the same thing but I feel like embelishing. For a long time we used GPS watches as GPS watches, but with time, as they tracked the quantified self, and fitness progression so the need for complete data grew. That’s why wearing three watches simultaneously stops being absurd and starts being logical. The issue is that when we slide between platforms we lose continuity if we don’t wear devices A, B, and C. That’s where Strava give us the flexibility to slide between platforms, without losing the geostationary satellite view of our fitness progression.

It is absurd to wear two or three watches, but if the data is siloed, then either we’re eccentric, or we depend on paywall features from apps like Strava.

Suunnon urheilukelloille saapui iso ohjelmistopäivitys

Karttaominaisuudet paranivat ja uutena toimintona tuli käyttöön urheilusuoritusten jälkeen mitattava palautumissyke.

https://www.puhelinvertailu.com/uutiset/2026/04/09/suunto-kello-ohjelmistopaivitys-palautumissyke

#suunto #urheilukello #älykello #juoksu #uutiset #teknologia #tekniikka

Suunnon Spark -kuulokkeet seuraavat askeltiheyttä, maakosketusaikaa ja pystysuuntaista heilahtelua. Lisäksi kuulokkeissa on niskan liikkuvuusarviointi, joka auttaa seuraamaan joustavuutta ja liikelaajuutta.

https://dawn.fi/uutiset/2026/04/09/suunto-spark-kuulokkeet-ominaisuudet-hinta

#uutiset #suunto #kuulokeet

Playing With Our Sports Data With Eleventy and Strava

This month Apple wants me to walk ten point three kilometres with the Apple Watch 10 times. Garmin and Strava want me to cycle 8000m uphill, 800km horizontally, and more. Apple, Garmin and one or two other companies want me to walk 300,000 steps per month.

Now, I have two ways of achieving these goals. The first way is to wear a Garmin watch to keep up with Garmin challenges, An Apple Watch for Apple challenges, a Suunto watch for Suunto challenges.

Alternativaly I could write a few lines of Javascript in my Eleventy-Strava project that allows me to track Garmin inspired, Suunto inspired and Apple inspired challenges, whilst wearing just one watch, rather than three.

The rational is simple. Of course, I could settle for Strava challenges, and wear a single watch, but where’s the fun in that. Suunto has one way of tracking fitness progress, Garmin has another, and Apple has a third. Apple also has an entire ecosystem of third party apps, for 25 CHF per year, up to 130 CHF per year if you’re eccentric. That cost is per app, not in total.

People feel that Garmin Connect+ is expensive at 75 CHF, and Strava at between 75 CHF solo, and 130 CHF with Runna, is also expensive. The cheapest gym membership is 49 CHF per month, but paid at once, and for a minimum commitment of a year.

The Fun Part – Personal Challenges

I live by the Jura so it’s normal, during the cycling season to ride up and down the Jura at least once per week. We could have a “Climbed the Jura” challenge. We could then count how many times I do it in a month. Another metric could be to count how many times I walked from Nyon to Geneva, distance wise.

I could also count how many centuries I do in a month. A metric century is a 100km ride.

Several apps track whether you run a 5k, 10k, 21k or 42k run. It would be easy to have a count of how many of each we accomplish per month.

Achievement Fatigue

I am just three days away from having closed all my rings 2250 times with the Apple watch and yet I rarely look at it these days. I look, at least once per month to see what the month’s challenge is, but other than that I grew less interested in it. If I mention adding this to the Strava-Eleventy experiment, it’s to see the code that would make this work, and as practice for prompt “engineering”. It’s about experimenting, and coming up with new projects.

In my summaries page, per year I could have “I ran ten 5k, three 10k, one 21k” and I cycled 50km or more twenty times, 100k or more, sixteen times and more”.

People, at the end of last year said “paying premium for the end of year summaries wasn’t worth it. With my playful idea, you’d have that yearly summary, all year long, and for as many years as you have been tracking sports.

Whether To Look Forward, or Backwards

At the moment I’m working from the Strava activities CSV, and each time I go for a run, walk, or cycle, I export it, add the strava event number and ad a line to the activities csv. It is then reflected on the site.

The questions are whether I want to check if various challenges are met for each future activity and if so how do I want to use that information. Do I want it to be checked on each build, or do I want to make it persistent? Yesterday I added a script to log tyre changes.

For runs I could have a script that checks “if a run is more than 5k, but less than ten mark it in the 5k list, if it’s between 10-21k mark it as 10k, and if it’s more than 21.1k mark it as 21k. It can function outside of the eleventy build process since this can add to the build time.

With the blog there was a long build time, due to some logic running for each build. When it was cached, then the build time was shrunk, and then shrunk again. That’s part of the learning process.

And Finally

The key strength of the Eleventy-Strava experiment is that once rendered it is tremendously fast. I can find information conveniently, without much waiting. If I use Garmin’s yearly summary displays as inspiration I could replicate what I find interesting. I will then see how figures changed through the years. The last two years have seen a lot of cycling. Previous years would have seen hiking, climbing and more.