Even though Apple is marketing the Apple Watch Ultra to mountain climbers, hikers, runners, triathletes, and even scuba divers, but not so much for cyclists.
When it comes to cycling, the Apple Watch will do a good job with GPS tracking and will provide you with distance, speed, and heart rate tracking. And it is very good at that. That might be enough for the majority of cyclists.
But then you have the data-hungry cyclists. The cyclists that want to see a lot more than speed and heart rate. They want cycling power data, maybe some additional power metrics like TSS and normalized power. This data is extremely important for long-distance cyclists, triathletes, time trialists, and particularly Ironman triathletes because this data is so essential in dialing in bike pacing.
Unfortunately, the Apple Watch and Apple Watch Ultra do not natively pair with a cycling power meter to collect and provide you with this information. But thanks to the App Store, there are a few apps that will let you do that. So in this video, I am going to talk about two apps that allow you to pair your Apple Watch to a power meter and display all these metrics on your watch. I will be using my Apple Watch Ultra in this video, but these apps should also work on your regular Apple Watch.
This simply pisses me off with apple. I bought my watch after last triathlon season and tried to pair my power meter this spring and found out I could not. Leave it to apple to miss the most important metric for cycling, yet they allow power meters for running, a sport which power is rarely used tracking. It sucks than none of these 3rd party apps have a multi sport option or triathlon option.