2024 In review – My favourites of the year, discoveries and sporting achievements
2024 In review – My favourites of the year, discoveries and sporting achievements
Here is a brief recap of 2024’s tech and my sporty shenanigans in the year. It’s been a pretty good year for gadget lovers, although nothing has grabbed my fancy (Hint: 2025). As far as racing goes…I actually achieved something for once!
I’m so impressed that I still use them most weeks.
Continental AERO 111 – Gimicky, I thought. But they seem to be a little bit faster and grip well.
Apple Watch Series 10 – Well, I’m not sure I was SO IMPRESSED with the Apple Watch 10, but I use it every day. It’s an incremental improvement from the older Watch I had.
Ravemen FR160 – A cleverly-mounted front-facing light. It’s not the brightest, but it makes my daytime cycling safer. There is a newer, brighter version, but this is OK.
Suunto Race S – a beautiful little game-changer at a decent price supported by an ever-improving app and 3rd party app store. If I wasn’t a triathlete doing this blog, I may use this as my running watch.
NNOXX One – Uniquely suited to data nerds. It gives you metrics you’ve only just heard of, plus ones you’ve never heard of nor thought were important for sports performance. But are.
Karoo 3 – I used it as my main bike computer in the middle of the year. It’s a beautifully usable bike computer with Ki2/Di2 that is due soon. Needs more battery.
Amazfit T Rex 3 – an interesting product for the market. I’ll never use this as my main watch, but others might. It’s a slightly cut-down Fenix 8 at a quarter of the price. It’s not as good as Fenix 8, but if Amazfit got their act together, it could cost Garmin lots of sales. Amazfit tends to copy their software onto another hardware format every few months 🙂 They must focus more on the software as the hardware is good eg an amazingly flowing display.
RingConn – An excellent smart ring that gives Oura a run for its money.
Ultrahuman Ring AIR – Another excellent smart ring that gives Oura a run for its money.
Also Reviewed and Commented On
Garmin Edge 1050 – Garmin’s best-ever Edge. Why didn’t they keep the usual shape…WHY?
Polar Vantage M3 – Polar’s M series has worked financial wonders for the company. M3 might, too…let’s see.
COROS Pace Pro – a nice watch, just priced similarly to better watches. One to watch: This could be a make-or-break watch for Coros.
Wahoo ELEMNT Ace – Great battery life, but not great enough. Innovative AIR PRESSURE/WIND sensor promises more for the future.
I had a good but largely uneventful year and stayed mostly uninjured, although I had a calf scare a few months ago.
I tried and succeeded in qualifying for some GB Age Group international multisport events next year. I even won one age-group qualifier – a feat I’d never previously managed, so I was pleased. The competition level is similar to a UK Nations Championship (US State Champs perhaps?) and a few steps up from many local multisport races. Yay! Go Me!
Chase The Sun was an interesting 200-miler done very much as a social event crossing the UK from East to West on the longest day, the aim being to finish in daylight…which I did.
I did my annual 80% age-graded 5K parkrun, a decent but not excellent standard that’s hard to achieve. They seem to be getting easier to bag, or maybe I’m getting fitter.
This site in 2024
Even though you might not notice it, I make significant changes in the topics I cover, don’t cover, or how I cover them each year. This year was no different as I made a few strategic changes, wrote more focused content, and introduced stylistic changes using Grammarly – Jeez; my grammar was bad before. However, in my defence, I would argue I tried to write with an authentic voice. The result of 2024’a changes has been a 25% increase in traffic compared to 2023, which I’m very pleased about.
This year’s most popular content was directly linked to Fenix 8, Forerunner 965 and Wahoo‘s restructuring as the original founder re-took control and injected investment into the company.
This site makes me enough money from various sources to warrant continuing. I’m still unhappy with the number of ads showing, but Google seems to think it’s about right now.
One fundamental issue I face is the continuing rise of YouTube’s popularity. I don’t see myself as having the inclination, skills, or time to go down that possibly more profitable route. The longer-term issue for me will be your use of ChatGPT to summarise content for you – you can bet your bottom dollar that Mr ChatGPT won’t pay the likes of me a penny/dime even though they train their models on my content and use my content without permission. The major media organisations will get revenue, but sites like this probably only have the option to go behind a paywall; you’ve already seen some sites try that, but I suspect the time is not right for me.
One more recent annoyance is that some of my affiliate partners stopped trading or paying. It has the same effect on me as you going to work for a month and then getting a blank paycheck. The causes inevitably seem to be various combinations of dishonesty and mismanagement. Some affiliate platforms I use either don’t work or have settings deliberately set aggressively by the brands that use them. For example, I see the number of outbound clicks double when a brand switches platforms, but the conversion to sales turns zero. I need to speak to a cookie expert! I’m not entirely sure, but I believe this can be exacerbated by some ad blockers blocking the cookies used to attribute sales to this site. (Reminder – if you subscribe to this site you should see the ads stop). I’m currently changing my ad providers.
One of the interesting coincidences over the years has been that I find potential partners keen to sign formal contracts are invariably the problem partners down the line. Most of my best partnerships work on trust, where an agreement is made directly with the owner.
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