Competing in an olympic-distance triathlon with an Apple Watch Series 4

Yesterday I mentioned that this last Sunday I competed in an olympic-distance triathlon with an Apple Watch. Thanks to the advice by Ian of “Apple Watch Triathlete” blog blog I downloaded the app Tri Tracker for my watch and it worked perfectly. Here’s the full story:

The app “just works” for a triathlon race!

It works the same way as the apps from Garmin and other “smart sports watch” manufacturers does - you start the app, choose a triathlon race, then you tap “open water swim” and it starts! Now after the swim you don’t have to look at the watch much - you just press the crown and the button below it at the same time - it creates a screenshot and it moves from “swim” to “transition”. After you’ve taken the bike, you press the two buttons again and it changes from “transition” to “bike”. After the bike you do the same and in the end you have a nice triathlon result. It’s all saved in your Health app. You can see my last week’s results above.

What if you use different apps? Activity, Strava, RunKeeper…

Well, I use RunGap to rule them all. This way every now and then I sync all my activities from all my apps and I have the stats and results in one place.

I use Strava for most of my longer bike rides or runs, but I don’t treat it as a social network. I’ve set my privacy on pretty high and I only have a bunch of my closest friends following me there. I’m just not a show-off. Or at least I don’t want to be.

When I’m doing shorter trainings I usually prefer to just use the Activity app on the Apple Watch so that I don’t inform everyone around what I just did. I like it this way.

And how was the battery life on the Apple Watch series 4 with cellular?

Using the TriTracker on my Apple Watch series 4 was great. I started the race with 80% of the juice and had around 30% when the race ended (after almost 3 hours of intensive workout!). This way I could still use the Apple Watch until 6pm the same day. Then I put it on a charger. Pretty decent result if you ask me.

A triathlon race with an Apple Watch is finally possible!

Anyway, just happy that I can finally do a full triathlon race without fiddling with touch screen and being distracted by the Apple Watch software. Just by pressing the two side buttons I can move from sport to transition to sport to transition and to sport again… and have an accurate result in my health app. This is quite a big of a deal for me.

P.S. On to Apple Watch Series 5 now!

Just yesterday I received a brand new Apple Watch series 5 and I’ll be blogging about my experience with the “always-on” display soon (spoiler: it’s a big deal!).