I am looking for a good fitness tracker to start doing cardio in a more measured way.
I was interested in Polar and Oura as EU alternatives (both Finnish companies), but both send data (health data, which is sensitive according to Article 9 of the GDPR) to AWS.
Are you aware of any EU solutions, or at least non-US, Chinese, Russian, or Israeli solutions, that do not send my data to companies in those countries?
I would like to be able to organize something self-hosted, but I don’t think I’m capable of doing that yet.
I don’t get it. Isn’t the main function of a fitness tracker the gps? How else can I know if I’m running 5, 10, 12 km, or whatever my goal for that day is?
Sure, all that health data is useless, but knowing the distance I’m running is pretty valuable for training.
I do trail running primarily these days so my actual distance I’ll just pull from the trail map.
If you do roads you can actually just drive the route in a car once, and use the trip function. You can also plan a route with a map or map app.
But the other, easiest thing to do would be to actually switch training paradigms from distance to time. Right so instead of running a 12k, or hitting 50km per week, you could say “On this training day I want to run at a tough but manageable pace for an hour, and I want to train 6 hours a week in general”
From there you just mix in some track days (or days you run any familiar route with a known distance) to get an idea of how far you might be running in those intervals of time, if you feel like you really need to.
You have to remember portable gps tech is an extremely recent thing compared to how long runners have been training. I’m not against progress for progress’s sake mind you but I just genuinely don’t believe the introduction of these apps and trackers, with their many flaws, has improved the quality of people’s training. The old ways also cost nothing and have no privacy or security risks which is a bonus for many people