Is the Apple Watch a great hiking tool?
I always found a timepiece to be a important piece of my hiking gear. Keeping track of time can be a great way orientate yourself as you briskly walk through time forgetting all but the landscape around you. This lose of time can effect the act of staying hydrated and maintaining your stamina on long through hikes. Moderating the times you drink, eat, and rest can bring huge impacts on many aspects of the hike. Sure, I have my phone, it does great job at keeping time, but unless I have it stashed outside of my pocket or backpack, the act of constantly pulling it out discourages me to do it often.
The Apple watches provide an interesting take on timepieces. They are not just a simple or even Swiss-army-knife of a watch like some watches are. The Apple watch is a full computer on the wrist. The Apple watch not only tells time, but can also provide information on the weather and weather updates, topographical information, heart rate and health information, it can be your wallet, and a communication device.
While the watch does all these fancy things, it does have its limitations that make some of these features not very practical on long hikes. Its biggest limitation is its battery life. Some features like recording your hike through distance, path taken, and elevation changes can not be used for extensive amounts of time without completely draining the battery life after a few hours.These faults made me think deeply on how to best use the Apple watch for my daily treks across the country, and this is what I came to.
Time
Keeping track of time is an important part of being on a hike. We wrote an article on increasing endurance on a through hike. The bulk of the article was about rest time and frequency. A timepiece can help keep track of when its time to rest and for how long to rest, which in turn, can improve your endurance and also avoid injuries due to overextending your bodies capabilities.
Time is important for many other reasons like making sure you are on schedule to leave or make it to town and even for knowing when restaurants will be open or serving meals of the day for hikers. Getting to town earlier on the Camino, for example, can be the difference between getting the good albergue bed and the yoga mat on the floor near the door.
Waking up at a certain time can help you fulfill your time obligations, but this is where Apple watches faults kick in. Using your apple watch to gently vibrate your wrist out of a slumber would be a great way to wake up and not disturb the other people in the hostel. Unfortunately, nighttime is the best time to charge your watch as most of the useful features are used during the day.
Hike tracking
The Apple watch collects and extensive amount of data if you let it. The watch can track your daily hikes collection elevation change data, gps data that tracks your distance and path taken, your average heart rate, calorie expenditure, and because its a watch it obviously tells you how long you have been walking for, stoping the timer if you stop moving.
This feature can not be utilize much because of the limitations of the small battery in the watch. The battery life on the watch is quite good for normal daily use, lasting about 18 hours or two full days of use, but once you start activating battery heavy features like tracking a hike, battery life tanks. On a long day-hike you wouldn't be able to track the whole hike, and if you did by using many battery saving techniques, would not have enough battery life for anything else that day.
Personally, I prefer using my phone to track my hikes. It will bring my phone down to about 30-50% battery life, but that is enough to get me through the day. The phone will collect all the major data except my heart rate which I'm fine with because the watch does that automatically, anyway.
Wallet
The Apple watch can be used to store credit and debit cards that can be used to make purchases even if you have no data connection. This makes the Apple watch a quick way to purchase something quickly and do it in one of the most secure way to date. Best part is, the watch does this through a contactless method which will prevent you from having others touch your card and possibly infect it with their germs/covid.
Communication
When hiking with others, we may separate throughout the hike knowing that we will meetup in the last town of the day. The communication features, specifically the walkie talkie mode, makes it a great communication device. Walkie talkie mode lets me blast a quick update or tell an anecdotal story that just happened to occur. “Dont go into that little bar on your right. The dudes creepy AF.”
The walkie talkie seems like a powerful tool for communicating but is stifled by its lack of reliability. Most of the time it tells me my comrades are not connected even though they, and I, have the feature turned on and also have a strong data connection. This can be frustrating and annoying when your trying to reconnect to them hoping the second or third time it will connect successfully. When it does work, it’s a great feature to the Apple Watch.
Health tracker
Apple touts the Apple watch as a great health tracker, and for good reason. The watch does a great job of keeping track energy expenditure estimated through movement and heart rate. This can be coupled with a calorie tracking app to help regulate ones weight or macro intake.
The new watches now have the capabilities to track heart rate related issues, and not only notify the user of these issues, but also notify their emergency contact, if the problem is grave, and also keep the data so it can be sent to the person doctor for review. The Apple watch can be a life saving device. To show Apple watches health prowess, the watch has a built in single-lead ECG to help further examine ones heart.
The Apple watch additional features like fall detection which will detect a fall. If the wearer is not responsive it will notify the emergency contact with the wearers location and also contact 911. I can see this being another life saving feature on the trail or even in daily life.
Camera shutter
I find this a nice feature for taking a picture with new friends or that obligatory end hike picture. Set up your phone and activate the shutter with your watch. This is not a life changing feature, but something I found useful on the trail.
Weather
This is quite an obvious feature of the Apple watch. While on the trail, with a flip of the wrist, you can check the upcoming weather or the hourly temperature. I took this a step further and downloaded an app that sends me notifications when its about to rain. Not a big deal, but a nice feature to have.
Music/podcasts
I have my watch set to download the 3 latest podcasts from a select favorite list of podcasts while charging and connected to wifi. This gives me enough to listen to on the days hike without using up data. The downside of this is the battery life drain. The act of playing the podcasts in this way drains the battery, not quickly per say, but it is another process the Apple watch has to undergo. As long as I'm not doing another battery heavy task, Ill listen to podcasts leaving my battery comfortably low at the end of the day.
