Good for a 13 yr. old runner?

[ang79]

My almost 13 yr. old daughter wants a fitness tracker for cross country.  In looking at the prime day sales today, I am considering the Alta HR (which I just ordered for myself last night as an upgrade from my original Flex), or the non-HR Inspire, both same price.  I like that the Inspire is water proof.  Which would you recommend for her to track steps, distance, and times of her runs during practice?  Unfortunately, her iphone ios is too old to run the fitbit app I think, so she would be syncing to and using the website at home on our chromebook to see her full stats.  

Do either (both?) of these have a stopwatch feature she can use?  

[ang79]

My almost 13 yr. old daughter wants a fitness tracker for cross country.  In looking at the prime day sales today, I am considering the Alta HR (which I just ordered for myself last night as an upgrade from my original Flex), or the non-HR Inspire, both same price.  I like that the Inspire is water proof.  Which would you recommend for her to track steps, distance, and times of her runs during practice?  Unfortunately, her iphone ios is too old to run the fitbit app I think, so she would be syncing to and using the website at home on our chromebook to see her full stats.  

Do either (both?) of these have a stopwatch feature she can use?  

[JohnnyRow · Accepted solution]

For cross-country I would think she would want something with the exercise app. The Alta HR relies solely on auto-recognition of exercise, so there is no way of telling it the start and stop times;  as a timer it might consider it still part of the workout just walking around with elevated heart rate after a run.  But having heart rate info is a big plus for training.

The Inspire does have the stopwatch per se, plus the ability to start and stop a workout.  But it is missing the heart rate.

Alta HR:  + for heart rate,  - for no exercise app or timer

Inspire:   - for no heart rate,  + for exercise app/stopwatch.

So  would rate it a toss-up, with Inspire HR the plusses of both but costing more.

P.S. to have own account, have to be at least 13.

Also I think I have heard the fitbit app might not be compatible with Chromebook.  You could try that with your own tracker to verify.

Also if you are syncing 2 people's tracker on same computer, each needs separate account and would have to log out of one account and into other one each time.

[ang79]

Thanks.  I was really hoping for a Prime Day sale on the Inspire HR for myself, but I decided to go with the Alta HR since it was only $50.  My old Flex still works, but I wanted an actual watch face and would have loved the exercise options or breathing/stress monitoring on the Inspire HR.  

Is it easy to set the start/stop exercise on the actual Inspire watch, instead of setting it on the app?  And will she be able to see the steps and times/distance of her exercise on the watch face?  Or does she need the app to see those?  At this point I don't think she has interest/knowledge to use the HR monitoring, she just wants to see her times/distance covered.  And have a watch on her wrist.  I now those stats aren't going to be spot on because she won't have GPS, but it is just to have a general idea to see if she is improving as she practices.

I will have to try the dashboard on our chromebook to see if it works.  She turns 13 in Sept., this would be an early B-day present as they have already started their training for the fall.  I was planning on setting up her own account in her profile on the chromebook.

[JohnnyRow]

You can see all the info on your wrist as real time.

It takes a bit to learn it, but then it is easy to use the on-tracker app for exercise.

To get best distance info, would want to check stride length, say by running lap on track and counting steps, or letting tracker count them.  Fitbit sets a default stride length but could be off - that is used for distance.

I think there are some issues with being able to read it in sunlight; wouldn't want to have to stop run and shield tracker from sun to see it during a race; I usually wear my Versa don't remember how much of a problem.

As far as age, if you wanted to give before birthday, you probably could figure out how to handle that.