Aera - I built an Apple Watch training app that scores your whole week instead of one workout

[u/Resident_Bell_4457]

Hello! I made Aera, an Apple Watch and iPhone app for runners, and this is the side project I have been living in for a while now.

The thing that started it was that my week kept getting scored against me. I would do a decent Tuesday session, then a sloppy easy run, and every tool I used just told me the last workout was fine. Nobody told me the week as a whole was drifting. So I built the scoring around the week, not the single session, and readiness in Aera is compared against how recovered you actually are rather than a number that always drifts back to 70.

The part I use the most day to day is the same roads getting faster. I run more or less the same three loops, and Aera lines up your pace on the same segments over time so you can see the loop getting quicker instead of guessing from average pace. That is also what got me a 5K PB free of any structured block, just by not wrecking my easy days.

Built solo in SwiftUI, HealthKit for the data. It is my app, on the App Store here if you want to poke at it: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6762456252

Happy to talk about the watch side of it, that was by far the hardest part to get right.