Kyle Seth Gray

Kyle Seth Gray's blog. Usually writing about tech, personal experience, but now leaning more towards health and fitness.

Swimming and wrong measurements

January started with me wanting to actually utilize two things - the awesome swim workout mode on the Apple Watch, AND the pool at my gym.

First swim workout

That first workout, I didn't really even know how to think of yardage with a pool, and because my pool happens to be not-so-standard, I just wrongfully assumed it was... 25 yards.

So that was really an 800 yard workout.

But after some discussion and further measurement/guesstimation/Kyle-just-bring-a-tape-measure, I settled on thinking it was more in the range of 21 yards.

Second swim workout

Turns out, after a solid month and a half of workouts, that was wrong as well.

This was really a 1,170 yard workout.

The pool's actual measurement? 47 feet long, ~15.66 yards. Not 21, and definitely not 25 yards. I'm pretty upset with myself for not measuring WAY earlier. And while it would be great to find a better local pool, nothing is better than one that is literally 50 yards away from my office. [Who knows if that yardage is right 😝]

Despite feeling behind, I definitely have already improved, and average about 80 to 90 laps per workout. And despite that being 1,200 yards, rather than the 1,680 I thought it was, the only way to go from here is going further and longer.

It'll be interesting to see what my Apple Watch thinks of my sudden drop in pace starting next week. And how the caloric estimates differ - Wolfram says it's about a 30 calorie difference, but we'll have to see.

It's been two long years

Two years of cycling a lot.

Figuring out different ways to do cardio.

Trying running bit by bit, never going more than 5 or so miles.

Cycling 100km in one go, 4000+ miles overall.

Doing different ellipticals, from super nice LifeFitness gear to crap ellipticals that my dad got on Craigslist for like $30.

Hiking 15 miles to close my rings because I couldn't bike that day, and I didn't want to run or get injured.

But I did it.

I ran a new 10K after two years.

First 10K in 2 years

New Years Award

Remember that New Years award for the Apple Watch? Remember how a bunch of people got it earlier than they should've?

Turns out™, the badge didn't get a date associated with it.

Here's the condition the original 2017 New Year's badge had for you to earn it:

activityData.history.consecutiveMoveGoalsMet >= 7 AND activityData.history.consecutiveExerciseGoalsMet >= 7 AND activityData.history.consecutiveStandGoalsMet >= 7 AND dates.dayOfWeekToday == dates.lastDayOfFitnessWeek AND dates.startOfToday >= 505267200

In plain language, it was awarded when you had 7 consecutive Move, Exercise, and Stand Goals, AND it was after the end of the week, AND it was after 505267200. I assume that's the start of 2017, but for some reason that in unicode time is 01/05/1986... [Is this some iOS thing? SQL? Help]
EDIT: I'm a doof. It's NSDate. So the date is 2017/01/05

The 2018 award on the other hand had its condition set to:

activityData.history.consecutiveMoveGoalsMet >= 7 AND activityData.history.consecutiveExerciseGoalsMet >= 7 AND activityData.history.consecutiveStandGoalsMet >= 7 AND dates.dayOfMonthToday >= 7

Which means it'll just throw it at you after you earn any perfect week after the badge was downloaded, which was on Dec 27, 2016 at 5:00:00 PM. So anyone getting their perfect week on the 28th, like me and many others , got the New Year's Badge way too early.

What it should've had is AND dates.startOfToday >= 536716800, which would've prevented the super early award winning by many.

My only question is why did it not have the date condition?

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On a similar note, it looks like the Heart Month award coming later this week should be fine, since it's marked as available after the 6th, and just has two queries: activityData.history.consecutiveExerciseGoalsMet >= 7 AND dates.dayOfMonthToday == 14 - 7 days in a row of meeting your Exercise Goal, earned on the 14th day of the month.