I honestly do not remember where I initially saw the app, Personal Best, first mentioned. However that happened, at some point I learned about it and I decided to download it.

The app automatically pulls in workouts from other sources, like your Apple Watch or any other app that writes to Apple Health, and gives you fun ways to track and/or share the details. And it works pretty seamlessly, after you complete a workout, a notification will pop up and indicate that Personal Best has received it.

I didn’t immediately take advantage of the 7-day free trial upon download, I waited until we were on vacation in Big Bear for a week to activate that. The main reason is I wanted to try it out with a few more options. I usually track all of my runs via Garmin and the majority of those these days are indoors on the treadmill. But I track outdoor walks with the dog on my Apple Watch. And when we go hiking I often track those with my Apple Watch and phone via AllTrails. So doing my free trial week made sense when I would be using a few different sources.

Each morning I got up and ran the dog a couple of miles. Since I didn’t have a treadmill at my disposal, that was the only way I would get any running in on vacation. Plus, it was delightfully freezing (literally, 32 degrees Fahrenheit), so running with the dog made the temperature more tolerable. My Garmin runs do sync into Apple Health, but apparently, it is not immediate all the time. I did not see them show up on the Personal Best app in a timely manner. I’m thinking that’s more of an issue between Apple Health and Garmin, not this app. Some days it synced in almost immediately, others it did not. I do know you need to open the Garmin Connect app after completing a run to try to force it to push to Apple Health. But it just gets lazy… (Talk about being unproductive, Garmin!)

Walks and hikes did show up quickly. I got a notification on my lock screen pretty fast after completing the workout, so I could go in and look at the workout details in Personal Best. I like that you can view a replay of your route, speeding it up or down to make a cool little video. Plus, when sharing a workout, you can select any photos you took during the workout and choose data options to overlay.

If you’ve been around here a long time, you might recall I used to take a photo of my feet during each run and share it with a weather overlay. Then that app decided it needed to become a subscription model at the ridiculous price of $9.99 a week. A WEEK! I tried editing photos for a little while myself to put the weather details in, but that was time-consuming. So I just ultimately stopped doing that. I do really like that Personal Best allows you to select specific metrics to put on your shared image. I also like that it encourages the use of an image description for accessibility purposes when sharing.

It would be nice if there were a few other layout template options for the overlays. Mainly because the circular badge that indicates what kind of workout you did could be disruptive to some of the photos. But maybe someday changing templates or positions will be an option.

The app’s dashboard on start-up has several options to show workout planning, insights, completed workouts, and goals. You can choose to turn these on/off and customize your experience. But you can’t change the order in which they display, just on or off.

To test the goal-setting functionality, I input that I wanted to cover 70 miles* of running during the month of June. The only annoying thing with is that the Garmin sync to Apple Health seems so slow. Now that the June goal has started, it’s always a day behind in measuring the output.

Setting up a goal is super easy. You can base it on the number of workouts, the total duration, or the distance you want to cover, as well as energy burned. Once you have set up the goal, then it will show up on your dashboard and keep track of it for you.

Just to be thorough I had to test the workout planning feature. I’m going to be honest here. The workout that I “planned” was frivolous just to try the feature. I knew I wouldn’t have that much time to work out on the specific day, but I would definitely be able to run around 2.5 miles that day. So I set a workout plan to run longer than 2.49 mi. And would you look at that? I was able to accomplish that workout!

I couldn’t tell if there was an easy way to schedule several upcoming workouts. It seemed like it was just a one-at-a-time thing. But if you could set up all of your planned/anticipated workouts for the week, that would be a cool at-a-glance feature.

The app has many other settings behind the scenes. I appreciate that it gives you the option to turn off the little comparisons like “you burned more energy than a box of six donuts”. Those kinds of things could be triggering for those with disordered eating. I’m now at the point where I can read those and dismiss them without feeling judgment one way or another. But it’s a thoughtful touch. (Other comparisons are in regard to distance accolades, elevation, or time… like “you exercised longer than the runtime of Titanic.” So there is a humorous element to it! You can turn those off if you prefer to remain stoic and serious.)

After my 7-day trial, I decided I appreciated the features and thought put into this app enough to pay for it for a year. It is a subscription, but right now it’s only $24.99/year. That is reasonable, especially given the effort the developer has put into it. Maybe I’ll even start sharing photos from every run again, if I can get myself back into a rhythm of running in the great outdoors more often. Someday, I’m going to feel normal and not need the bailout option from being safely inside my home, right? RIGHT?!

*70 miles used to not even be a question, I usually got 120ish a month. Now it’s my stretch goal?!