About me
As a student I ran on the track near my home. Fifteen minutes, a few kilometres, to shake off the stress of the day. Back then I didn't even think you could run further.
Then came my first Forerunner, a fēnix 5, and now a fēnix 7 that rarely leaves my wrist. I'm an amateur athlete, and Garmin is about three things for me: how I sleep, how I recover and how I train. Over the years I noticed my watch knows far more about me than it shows.
Try again next year
My dream is to run all six World Marathon Majors and get the six-star medal. For years I've entered the ballots: London, New York, Berlin, and this year Tokyo. Every time, the same email: try again next year.
So when I planned my year before it started, I wrote down Amsterdam. Honestly, because you could still buy a place there, no ballot needed.
My watch said 3:19
I trained for it almost from January, and every session went through Garmin: my coach set the plan, I just pressed start. Before the race I checked the marathon time prediction. It said 3:19. I thought: no way, I'll do 3:15.
At kilometre 37 I slowed down at a water station and never got my pace back. I finished in 3:19:21. A personal best, and I know I gave it everything I had. My watch knew my time before the start.
The mountain I kept putting off
Mont Blanc hung on my dream board for years. I kept putting it off because I thought you had to be in incredible shape for it. Then a friend said: let's go to Kilimanjaro. I'd always wanted to see Africa, so I thought, why not.
For the last two days before the summit, my Body Battery sat at 5, the lowest it ever shows. Not a graph, just a flat line along the bottom of the screen. I made it to the top anyway.
Six months later I climbed Mont Blanc too, the highest mountain in the Alps.
Why Peakreel
Garmin is great at running my training. What I was missing was the bigger picture: how I grow. Not one workout but a whole year. How my usual week has changed, where I got stronger, what happened between the marathon and the mountain.
So I wrote a script for myself that turns my data into one calm picture. That's how Peakreel started. Now it's a website for anyone who loves their data as much as I do.
What the demo shows
It's my real data for a year: a marathon in 3:19:21, Kilimanjaro at 5,903 m, and all the weeks in between. Heart rate, sleep, weight and any places are left out.
How I treat data
No GPS and no home location. Analytics (Google Analytics) runs only if you agree. A private mode runs everything on your own computer and sends nothing anywhere.
Peakreel is not affiliated with Garmin. Garmin is a trademark of Garmin Ltd.