Building the workout journal I always wanted
Doing different kinds of sports is an important part of my identity. Over the years I moved through gymnastics, taekwondo, kickboxing, CrossFit, running, road cycling, hiking, yoga, kitesurfing, and scuba diving. All of those disciplines shaped who I am, and for each of them I have sessions I will always remember: a private CrossFit session with three close friends during sunset in summer. Multi-day low-budget cycling trips through Europe. The first kite session where I finally managed to just ride, ride, ride for many kilometers because it finally clicked. I enjoy thinking back on those memories and I am hungry to chase more of them.
How much I trained always depended on the phase of life—university, PhD, startup, becoming a parent. But I always found a way back, because going all out in a workout occasionally keeps me balanced.
The data side of sports
Beyond the sports themselves, I've always been drawn to the data side of it. I wore fitness watches way before they were cool—think Polar watches in the early 2000s. For the last decade I was obsessed with tracking every workout and step that I made. I tracked every run and cycling tour since 2010 and I still have the records in a really cool Mac app called Rubitrack that's been around for a long time. At the same time, I have a file with all my CrossFit PRs for lifts and well-known standard workouts. I've got a file about all my kite sessions where I wrote down notes about the spot, conditions, and what I learned and experienced. For scuba diving, I am using the Oceanic app, which is great for diving with Apple Watch Ultra and also logs dives and basic notes about them. At the same time, there are hundreds of photos of hikes, dives, kitesurfing sessions, CrossFit whiteboards, and so on buried in my photo library.
Why not use an existing app?
For years I've been wondering if there's a single place to collect all of that information. There are dozens of apps and I tried many of them. But none of them felt truly right for me. Too focused on one or a few disciplines. Too obsessed with metrics I don't care about as an amateur athlete. Too overloaded with gamification. Too complicated to use. Too much about showing off on social feeds.
What I wanted instead was something simple that is completely agnostic to the kind of sports, with a simple, clean and super fast user interface, the possibility to write down some memories and attach a photo or two. Some metrics on performance are OK but they are second-class information and should be minimal and focused on the basics. In addition, it should work offline and save all data locally and not monetize it in any way.
Building it myself
I always had a soft spot for clean, native Mac apps. I find a lot of joy in the simplicity and ease of use of native apps like Things 3 or NetNewsWire. For more than a decade, I had the wish in the back of my head to build a similarly simple, clean and fast native app. I honestly never took the courage to actually get started, but the idea of creating a macOS app has been nagging me for years.
On a Saturday some weeks ago, I combined this desire for a simple workout journal with my desire to create a Mac app and just began building. I called the app Sweat Diary and a first rough version was created in a matter of two evenings.
Since Sweat Diary is a passion project, not a business, it is free. This allows me to build it for my personal needs rather than chasing an audience and revenue targets.
Go check it out at sweatdiary.app. I'm happy to hear your feedback.