Kyle Seth Gray

In watchOS 4, for some reason, breathe notifications use a series of witchcraft and undocumented mysteriousness to maybe sometimes eventually send you notifications.

I’ve found this to never be the case and be quite awful in practice. In that, I never freaking get notified.

My solution, until September, is to make a notification setting in the Streaks app.

Streaks is this awesome app that can remind you do a bunch of things, and keep up 'streaks'. What's awesome is Streaks integrates directly with HealthKit. Which means, if you do whatever item you want to accomplish (say, 5 breathing minutes), Streaks will notify you and automatically mark the task as complete!

So basically, it's a great habit maker without all the glitchiness of notifications of hummingbird DeepBreathing on watchOS 4.

The first setting is simple enough - make a streak that encourages me to do at least 5 breathing sessions every day.
Second, you can edit the specific notification times by going into the top bar, taping the sideways … ellipsis, and then scrolling down. By default it only notifies you around the end of the day if you haven't done the task you've set out to do.
Lastly, I have custom times set so that I remember throughout the day, rather than at the end of the day, so I remember to Breathe.

Anyways, here's my setup. I honestly really like the breathing stuff in watchOS, but get frustrated when it just doesn't work.

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.

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.

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.

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.