Target zone
Pick one zone to train in and hear when you are about to enter or leave it, before you do.
What to expect
Pick the zone you are training in, and the app starts helping you hold it instead of just recording where you ended up.
The spoken alerts move to the edges of that zone, and they arrive while you can still do something about it:
- Almost there. Coming up from below, so you push the last few beats instead of sitting just under your zone for half an hour.
- About to drop out. Drifting down toward the bottom edge, the one that keeps an easy hour honest.
- About to go over. Nearing the top edge, before a steady session quietly turns into a hard one.
- Back in range. Recovered down into your zone after a hill or an interval, so you know when to settle.
Which alert you hear depends on the edge you are near and the direction you are moving, so climbing toward the top of your zone and falling toward the bottom never sound the same.
It won't chatter at you
Hovering right on a boundary is where this kind of feature usually becomes unbearable.
So it stays deliberately quiet. One warning as you approach an edge, not a repeat every few seconds while you sit near it, and no second announcement when you then cross the edge you were just warned about. Drift back into the middle of the zone and the warning arms itself again.
It follows the voice settings you already have. Alerts off means silent, and it ducks your music the same way zone changes do.
How it differs from zone change alerts
The alerts today tell you what already happened. That is useful as a record and nearly useless for correcting, because by the time you hear that you have left zone 2 you have been out of it for a while.
This tells you what is about to happen, which is the version you can act on with the phone in a pocket or an armband and the screen out of sight.
If you set your own boundaries with Custom zones, the alerts use those.
Why we're building it
Most training is one zone at a time. You go out to spend an hour in zone 2, or to hold zone 4 for the work intervals, and everything outside that target is either wasted or counterproductive.
ZonePoints is good at telling you what you did and, at the moment, unhelpful while you are doing it. More than one person has asked for the same thing in almost the same words: let me pick the zone I am going for, and tell me when I am about to leave it.
When it's ready
No date yet. Use Vote for this feature at the top of this page and you'll get one email the day it ships.