I’ve been using the Apple Watch for years for one main purpose: health tracking. I wear the Apple Watch around the clock, except for when it’s charging, so it can capture health data during my day-to-day life and when I work out.
I’ve intensified my training in the past couple of years as I got back into running half-marathons and then started training for a full marathon. I ran my first marathon recently, and I couldn’t have done it without the Apple Watch. Even the 40mm second-gen Apple Watch SE was good enough for my needs during training and the actual race.
What I’m getting at is that I’m happy with the Apple Watch’s health-tracking capabilities, including workout data. I will most likely upgrade to the Apple Watch Series 10 this fall so I can track even more health data.
However, I’ve just discovered the most annoying thing I’ve encountered so far, not just on an Apple Watch but on any Apple device.
The problem
The Apple Watch can detect certain workouts, but I routinely start my workout tracking manually. For the most part, I’ve used the default running workout in the Workout app. I just select the Outdoor Run mode and then run according to my plan for the day.
I overhauled my half-marathon training about a year ago by incorporating ChatGPT guidance. The chatbot gave me a plan to run half marathons comfortably that included all sorts of running drills, including speed or tempo runs. That meant I had to customize certain workout sessions so the Apple Watch captured all the data.
Tap the three-dot menu on the Outdoor Run tile to customize your run to meet your needs. For speed runs, I need a warmup phase followed by a specified number of intervals of running and recovery periods. Then, I finish it all off with a cooldown jog.
Until a few days ago, I simply customized the app’s preloaded tempo run option. That meant I had to make little changes, like modifying the length of the run and the number of repeats.
However, I decided to do something different recently for my speed sessions. I wanted a custom workout for strides. These are short bursts of acceleration at close to top speed followed by rest. Rinse and repeat the number of times you want to do it. Before and after the strides session, I wanted an easy jog to warm up and then cool down.
That’s when the hell experience started on Apple Watch.
The annoying solution
I removed my 40mm Apple Watch to handle the screen better and went to the Workout app to create a custom running workout. So far, so good.
I tapped Create Workout at the end of the menu:
I then scrolled for the Custom option in purple.
I then tapped the Warmup menu to begin entering my parameters:
I wasn’t expecting what followed next. I needed a specific distance, so I went to set it. I had to scroll using the Digital Crown or my finger on the screen to go from the default 1,000 meters to 3,000 meters. It felt like forever.
It wasn’t clear to me that I could have tapped Meters to switch to kilometers instead. When I went back to replicate the customization, it dawned on me that I could switch to kilometers. Still, I would have needed to scroll from 100km to 3km.
Adding the actual parameters for the strides was a lot simpler. I just set the rule for the work and recovery sessions, and set the number of repeats. Nothing wrong here.
But then I had to enter the Cooldown distance. You can probably guess what I did. I had to Digital Crown the distance from 1,000 meters to 3,000 meters. Again.
At least it’s done so I can save the workout and actually go outside and play. Nope, I first went to give it a Custom Title.
I hate having to type on the Apple Watch display, no matter what size it is. Here, you will draw letters to type. I hated the entire thing with the passion of a thousand suns. I then tapped the Done button that appeared, thinking my custom workout was saved.
Not so, apparently. I should have kept scrolling after typing the name to tap the Create Workout button at the bottom. The Done button I had pressed only meant I was done drawing letters on the screen.
After all that scrolling and typing, my workout wasn’t saved. Sure, it was a user error, but the user interface isn’t that helpful. So I had to restart the entire thing again, complete with scrolling to 3,000 meters by hand. Twice. At this point, I’d have rather done anything than run that day.
I bet that all this tweaking with an aging Apple Watch actually ate precious battery life, which I could have used later. Sure, it was my mistake not to check the battery life. But I ended up recording just about 9.5km of my 10km custom workout session as my Apple Watch died.
As much as I love using the Apple Watch, customizing workouts on the device should be illegal. The experience is atrocious because the screen is too small for all the customizing you need to do. I’d rather do it on the iPhone, but there’s no such option for now.
I haven’t tried creating other custom workouts on the Apple Watch, and I don’t think I will do it anytime soon. I can only hope that Apple will let us create custom workouts on the iPhone in the future.
I’ll also note that I’m running the latest iOS 18 and watchOS 11 betas. They don’t offer a way of customizing workouts in the Apple Watch app on the iPhone.
