Since Strava has decided to sue Garmin, and since Suunto has decided to sue Garmin as well, for different reasons, I feel now is a good opportunity to remind ourselves of how to upload to Garmin and Strava manually.
Exporting to Strava Garmin If you record an activity with a Garmin device, you can navigate to connect.garmin.com, log in and go to the activity. You can export file, TCX or GPX.
In the 2000s I was using a Nokia N95 8gb with Sports tracker to track my walks every day. Eventually, when I started scuba diving I switched to Suunto to track dives, and eventually wore one for hikes, and then I upgraded to the Suunto Ambit 2, 3, Spartan Wrist HR Baro and then the Peak 5.
At the same time as I was jumping from one watch to another Sports Tracker was growing, and then Suunto bought it, and it became Movescount and this app was truly fantastic.
People know that I love to hate the Apple Watch. I have loved to hate it since I had an Apple Watch Series 3 where the screen cracked while indoor climbing. For years I had climbed with Suunto without any issues. I replaced the Apple Watch Series 3 with a Series 4 and that watch lasted for four years. I still have it but the battery dies within half a day.
For the TLDR Crowd. Yesterday after multiple tries to pair my phone with my watch I hard reset the phone and tried again. When it asked me to login to iCloud I did, and then I was able to pair the phone with the watch.
For the patient crowd, for several days I was unable to pair my Apple Watch SE with my iPhone SE 2nd gen. I tried rebooting and resetting the watch and I had no luck.
Yesterday I came across something interesting and frustrating. Apple watches don’t need to be obsolete, themselves, to be unusable. If you try to pair an iphone 8 plus with an Apple Watch it will refuse because the OS is two generations too old. I tried to sync with the Iphone SE from 2020 and I am also having issues. The OS is 18.x so it should work fine.
It’s not just the watch that has to be kept up to date.
I see people. I see them say that they have given up on wearing fitness trackers and smartwatches because they hate the tyranny of the device. I have felt an intense dislike for Apple behaves in particular. At the same time I have been playing wit Sportstracker for eighteen years or so. My fitness tracking habit is old enough to drink and old enough to drive.
This isn’t a post about drinking, or driving.
For years I wore no watch, and then I took up scuba diving, and then I wanted to wear a watch when climbing, and then it escalated from there. Now I have Garmin, Suunto Apple, Casio, Xiaomi and other watches. It’s easy to justify wearing the Apple watch because it’s a smart watch so it has a niche. It’s harder to justify the Garmin, Suunto, Xiaomi and Casio watches because they overlap each other.
A few months ago I was thinking of getting a new iPhone SE and then I read that it would go up in price by at least 50 USD and that it would have an Apple modem and more and I lost interest in upgrading. For me the niche served by a budget phone is that it is affordable. By affordable I mean below 500 CHF to buy new, when it’s current.
A few minutes ago I looked at my Apple Watch and it said that I had not stood for the last two hours so I got up and walked around until it said that I had stood this hour. The irony is not lost on me that a watch would tell me that I am not active enough.
The Apple Watch wants you to stand for a minute an hour for six to 18 hours per day.
Apple push us to get the Apple Watch Series 10, the Ultra 2 or the Apple Watch SE in third place. If you’re a runner, and you don’t feel like spending on the Ultra or the Ten then it makes sense to get the SE instead.
Although the SE is the cheaper option it still provides us with plenty of running metrics. It provides heart rate, pace, power, cadence, vertical oscilation, ground contact time, stride length, workout time, distance, elevation gain, average cadence, average pace, average power, active kilocalories, total kilocalories and more.