We’ve been pretty critical of the Apple Watch around these parts. We stand by that criticism. In fact, as a wearer of the Apple Watch since its launch, I’m here to underline it: Don’t buy an Apple Watch as a gift this holiday season.

Several months ago, I got into an argument with my girlfriend’s mother, who is—according to her sources—always right. My girlfriend, KP, was training for the New York Marathon. Her mother texted me to say that she was buying KP a smartwatch by Garmin.

“I did all the research,” she said. “It’s the best one for runners.”

“Oh, Barb, what a mistake,” I tried to imply subtextually. “I’m buying his-and-her Apple Watches, which will clearly provide the best experience not just for running a marathon, but for the race we call life.” It took some convincing—this is a family of tenacious Greek women—but I won out: KP would get an Apple Watch, while her mom would buy her some technical clothing.

Now, having worn our Apple Watches for the last couple of seasons, I have a terrible confession: I’m pretty sure Barb was right. KP wore her Apple Watch throughout her training, despite its inability to track her running location data in Nike+ without carrying her phone along with her on every training run. She wore it while running the New York Marathon, and its battery conked out 2.5 hours in.

I asked KP to list her biggest gripe about using the Apple Watch as a fitness tracker—she gave me four.

1) It’s slow

2) It doesn’t work about 40% of the time (just stays frozen on the “outdoor run” screen).

3) If you want to just wear it and go, you have to swipe four times to get to the simple “Open, No Goal” setting

4) To my knowledge, it doesn’t actually save my total runs, pace, and mileage. It just logs them on my iPhone as EACH INDIVIDUAL STINKING STEP. Do you really want me to count every single step to determine my total run? I would love to be able to access my accumulated runs and review my progress (like Nike+). I had assumed that the Workout app did save my runs, so I stopped using Nike+, only to realize it didn’t store them, so I lost 3 weeks worth of mileage. (Note: I could be wrong and maybe there is a way to log them but its not advertised / common knowledge / easy to find.)

As a health and activity tracker, the Apple Watch is adequate at best. Even Apple critic John Gruber has lost interest in tracking his activity—or even wearing his Apple Watch every day. (I will say that I’ve logged several amazing activity days when my Apple Watch confused driving down the highway as running, while it was concurrently being used for driving directions.)