Ski Tracks mini review
Towards the end of my recent trip to Pas de la Casa I realised that I was missing the telemetry I’d got from the Valnord App whilst skiing in Arinsal. A quick search suggested that the Ski Tracks app would be a good purchase for my iPhone and Apple Watch, so this is a reflection on the single day that I used it so far.
It worked pretty much as expected
As I got booted up before the first lift I set the app in motion from my Apple Watch (Series 2), and as I glanced at it after a few runs it seemed to be recording runs as expected.
When I got to the end of the day and looked at the phone app I was surprised to see nothing there, but then it imported the days runs presenting an overview:
a chart of speed and altitude:
and a breakdown of individual runs:
Faster earlier?
I was pleased that my day had been recorded, but a bit miffed about some inconsistency. When I looked at my watch after run 13, which had been a clear blast down Obagot III it had read 122.6km/h (76.2mph), so how did that become 64.3mph?
I now wish I’d done a screen grab of my Apple watch.
Health Tracking
One of the main things I use my Apple Watch for is health tracking, and I’d been surprised how little activity got clocked up in my first few days. The watch was barely registering the hike from the hotel to the lifts and back.
Using Ski Tracks seems to have massively over-corrected things:
It seems that every minute I had the app running counted as exercise (even when it knows I was stood standing for lifts or sat on them); and I’d clocked up a whopping 1700+ move calories – I should have felt much hungrier by the end of that day :0
Hopefully this stuff will get fixed in an update. I’d like my actual ski time to count as movement and exercise, but not all the waiting around for lifts etc.
It didn’t run down my batteries
A big promise for this app was to not run down batteries (which can happen quickly when GPS is used all the time), and it kept good to that promise. My watch battery seemed to go a little quicker than usual, but my phone was still at around 60% at the end of the day skiing.
Filed under: review | 2 Comments
Tags: Apple Watch, GPS, iphone, review, Ski Tracks, skiing, telemetry
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Chris Swan's Weblog 
I have been using ski tracks for some time also and wondered about the precision of indicated speed or max speed. For instance when skiing you rarely if ever go down a straight line. Secondly GPS data is plus or minus 5m accurate for lat/lon and 50m for altitude I think. So I analysed some of my GPX data from a recent ski track (on android phone w about 5000 points) and surely enough it logs lat-lon and elevation precisely every second. There are some glitches in the data points, when all of a sudden there appear to be extreme inreases in speed when I was not moving (like from 2kph to 104kph).
I wonder how ski tracks handles these glitches. Could the program eliminate some of these glitches, if so how, and could they also affect indicated speeds?
There’s a lot of chat on Strava about relative/apparent speed and GPS accuracy in the vertical on climbs/descents…I always claim the higher is correct of course. Chapeau for the 122kph Chris…ballsy!