Guide
Does Apple Watch show your top running speed? How to see your sprint speed on the wrist
Apple's Workout app gives you pace and splits, not the top speed of a sprint or your best 100 m. Here is what the watch records on its own, what it does not surface, and how to get your peak speed and per-distance bests from the same sensors.
What the Workout app shows
Start an outdoor run in Apple's own Workout app and you get what distance runners need: elapsed time, distance, current and average pace in minutes per kilometre or mile, heart rate, and kilometre or mile splits afterwards. On recent watches it also records running form, meaning stride length, ground contact time, vertical oscillation and running power.
What it does not do is tell you how fast you went. There is no top speed for the run in the summary, no fastest 100 m, and pace is shown as time per kilometre, which is a unit that stops meaning anything over a ten-second effort. Apple Health does store running speed as a data type, and with patience you can dig a daily maximum out of the Health app, but that is a number for a day, not for a sprint, and it says nothing about your best 200 m.
What the watch actually records
The sensors are not the limit. Apple Watch samples GPS about once a second during an outdoor workout, reads the accelerometer far faster than that, and the watch already turns those into the running speed samples that Apple Health stores. Everything needed to time a sprint is on your wrist. What is missing is an app that looks for the sprint inside the run.
How SpeedRun shows your top speed
SpeedRun is an outdoor run for the same sensors, with a sprint timer inside it. Jog to warm up, tap SPRINT, take the 3-2-1 countdown, and the watch shows your speed live in metres per second, large, with distance and heart rate under it. When you ease off, the rep is done, and you have:
- Peak speed, the fastest instant the watch caught in that sprint, in m/s and km/h.
- Best average over 100, 200 and 400 m, found as the fastest continuous window over each distance anywhere in the run.
- Cadence through the sprint, and the second you hit your peak.
On the iPhone the records screen keeps your all-time top speed and your best average per distance beside your rolling recent form, and every sprint has an anatomy page with the speed curve. Nothing about that changes how the run is saved: it goes to Apple Health as an outdoor run with the GPS route, distance, energy, heart rate and running form, and in Fitness it looks like a run from Apple's own app. The sprint splits, peak speed and cadence ride along as workout metadata.
Reading the number honestly
Two things to keep in mind, because we would rather say them than quote a number we cannot stand behind.
- Peak speed from GPS is a filtered estimate, not a photocell. The app median-filters the speed samples and refuses peaks that the window average cannot support, and it treats anything at or above 12.5 m/s as an artifact, since the fastest human ever measured over a 10 m segment was about 12.3 to 12.4 m/s. On a straight, under open sky, your peaks are consistent enough to train by.
- Best average is a rolling window, which is closer to a flying sprint than to a race from blocks. Compare it with your own last week, not with a race time from a stopwatch.
The sprint timer guide goes through the accuracy in more detail, and the pace chart turns any speed into km/h, mph and a 100 m time.
What you need
An Apple Watch that runs outdoor workouts, an iPhone for the history, and the Health and Location permissions the app asks for on first run. No account, no subscription, nothing leaves the device.
The short answer
Apple Watch measures your speed. It does not show your top speed for a sprint or your best 100 m, because the Workout app is built for distance. SpeedRun reads the same sensors, times the sprints inside your run, and keeps your peak and your per-distance bests, then saves the run to Apple Health as if Apple had recorded it.
