My First (private) Super Sprint Triathlon with Apple Watch 3 this Weekend

Here's the Plan

I will have my cool new Apple Watch 3 tomorrow.  First thing I want to do is test it out with some sort of triathlon.

Since there is no event that I know of, or have entered nearby, I am going to do my own little training event at my favourite local lake (Leybourne Lake Watersports)

This means:

  1. 400m Open Water Swim in my local lake with a wetsuit (temperature is currently 17deg).
  2. 10k Road Bike on fairly flat route (here's the route) 
  3. 2.5k Run around the lake (and here's that route)

Allowing for leisurely transitions at the lake and a fairly steady pace, I should do that in under an hour.

I'm going to record this entirely on my Apple Watch 3 using the standard Workouts app.  I'll have my Garmin Forerunner 935 on my other arm though so I can do some comparisons post fun.

Here's what I think we will get with Apple Watch 3 (and what we won't)

The Swim

Apple Watch 3 should handle the open watch swim just fine, tracking the time and route - it will be interesting to see if we get any HR data.

The Bike

I expect to get accurate route and time, together with the HR data.  With the Workout app there is no option for trying to connect my speed/cadence sensors or Power Meter, let alone my DI2 sensor, so for this workout I am not going to try.  However this will be something I will be looking at by using other apps, and by using an Ant+ to BLE bridge in later posts.

The Run

Don't see any issues here.  Will get the route, the time and the HR.  As above I won't be attempting to connect my Stryd foot pod.

UPDATE - just ran a very easy paced 10K and recorded it using my Apple Watch series 2 running watchOS4, then exported it to Strava using the updated RunGap app, and was pleased to see that cadence was recorded too (even though it doesn't show anywhere I can see in the Apple Activity app)

Transitions

I'll use the multi-sport features of the Workout app to hack transition data (see this post for details)

What's the point?

My goal here is to determine if Apple Watch 3 using the standard Apple Workout app can be useable to record a triathlon, even if it is just at short distances and with basic data. If it passes, then we can move on to bigger things and see how Apple Watch stacks up.