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In Depth Product Reviews
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Read My Sports Gadget Recommendations.
Here’s my most recent GPS watch guide here, and cycling GPS computers here. Plus there are smart trainers here, all in these guides cover almost every category of sports gadgets out there. Looking for the equipment I use day-to-day? I also just put together my complete ‘Gear I Use’ equipment list, from swim to bike to run and everything in between (plus a few extra things). And to compliment that, here’s The Girl’s (my wife’s) list. Enjoy, and thanks for stopping by!
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Have some fun in the travel section.
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My Photography Gear: The Cameras/Drones/Action Cams I Use Daily
The most common question I receive outside of the “what’s the best GPS watch for me” variant, are photography-esq based. So in efforts to combat the amount of emails I need to sort through on a daily basis, I’ve complied this “My Photography Gear” post for your curious minds (including drones & action cams!)! It’s a nice break from the day-to-day sports-tech talk, and I hope you get something out of it!
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The Swim/Bike/Run Gear I Use List
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And some of us poor schmo’s are going to KONA!
timely post Ray. I ran a half marathon in Sydney (inner city) on Sunday and my 405 recorded the distance as 21.78km, which made my pace readings appear as though I was going much faster than I was. At avg 4:39 per km, I thought I might be doing the run in under 100 minutes, sadly not so!
Dan
good post! i just posted something myself about this and your point about the manual lap vs auto lap after a half marathon i did on sunday. great minds think alike..
one thing though.. when you say that gps error would give not only contribute to longer estimates but also shorter, i’m not sure i agree. as you point out in your original post, to run 26.2 miles requires you to take the shortest (optimal) course. therefore any deviation from this course will increase the distance you run. only in the case that you run a sub optimal path and your gps unit just happens to have an error that is a more optimal path (like if you zig zag and it assumes you are actually running in a straight line, for example) would you get a shorter course due to error. seems unlikely to me – so that explains the bias.
the half marathon course i did on sunday came up 500 meters long but when i looked at the course traced out by my garmin, i could see that the meanderings would probably explain most, if not all of it.
good luck in the marathon! i also have one in a couple of months and am hoping to break 3 hours. your time of 2:54 is very impressive!
The point about thinking ahead of crowds is a good one. In very crowded situations, such as the first few miles of a course, I prefer to take a wider line on curves to maintain my pace and avoid getting stuck. This feels right but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s suboptimal!
I’ve been using Garmins for many years and many many races. I also have done more experiments than DC Rainmaker to ‘prove’ the GPS will always be long in races no matter how close to the tangents you run.
I have measured my block to a couple of feet short of 0.3 miles using a very good wheel. I slowly walked it several times so not to have any skipping on the very flat asphalt.
If I run slowly with my arm steady, I got very close to 0.3m. It was better on a bike going very slowly. When I ran faster, it would be more than 0.3m (I read the file in meters). The faster I ran, the longer it would read. Over the course of a marathon, this error would be very large…over 1/4 mile.
When I let my wife use the same watch at her 10 mpm pace, she always reads a shorter distance on the same courses I run at my 7 mpm…every time.
My theory is arm swing throws off the reading ever so slightly, but it adds up over time.
Quick issue: mile markers. I’ve done a lot of races, triathlons, etc. where the “official” course markers have been off — sometimes considerably off. Usually they end of getting back on target so maybe it doesn’t matter, but at least mentally I would think that it could really screw up your calculations.
Hi Rob-
One interesting thing I found in the GPS accuracy tests is that there are some watches that do indeed measure short. For example, the Timex Global Trainer has a solid history of measuring 2.5% short (exactly 2.5%, almost scary exactly). And the FR610 also measured 2% short.
Hi Unknown-
Regarding arm swinging movement, that’s an interesting idea to test – and super easy. I’ve just added it to a future post listing. I can do some tests on the pre-marked courses I have (using a roller) with different arm swinging styles and see how it works out. I have found though that at least for me – I can get a number of the watches to be within a couple meters of the course of a mile long course. Others, not so much.
Hi Senior-
Definitely a valid point on official markers. I find that at some of the more well established and bigger races they tend to get them right. Though, I’ve also seen that hosed. But in most cases even if one is off, the rest tend to be correct – so I hope it evens out. Obviously if I see a difference that’s substantial, then I’ll probably ignore it (or just quit and eat ice cream…).
It would be cool if they added pace range alerts like they have for cadence and heart rate. but I don’t really trust pace readings in wooded areas any more on my 310xt.
I’m tempted to run my next race solely on heart rate. mostly because there’s a 1000′ steep climb at mile 23
Ray,
Have you tried to search for “Race Activities” recently on Garmin Connect. (You have to go back to classic). I cannot get it to find any results. I ran a 5K on Sunday that only showed up as 2.96 miles on my watch. When I checked strava’s flyby, every person who ran the 5K had a distance between 2.95 and 3.0 miles. But that was only 6 people on Strava vs. 498 runners. So I wanted to try and get more data points by utilizing what you did here. But it won’t find any activities on the map, at any distance, time, or activity type. Has Garmin permanently broken this feature?
Thanks for all you do.
No, I haven’t tried recently. one thing to keep in mind is that people might not be setting it to ‘Race’ anymore. :-/
I didn’t use Race as a filter. (And I set mine to Race, so it should have at least found that, if that is a requirement). It found absolutely nothing.
I found his old post and the one on running the optimal race line very useful. Garmin’s Connect IQ now allows me to use a more geeky version of Ray’s pacing strategy.
I have taken advantage of Connect IQ to write a Garmin data field (“Race Screen”) that, by hitting the lap button when passing an official course marker, rounds the distance displayed by this field to the nearest kilometer or mile (depending on the distance units configured in the device’s settings) and adjusts the average pace displayed by the field accordingly. This is a convenient way to compensate for the difference between the GPS-measured distance and the actual distance run on the course and help me pace my race. It also displays in a single screen the most relevant information for running a race –or training– so that it is easy to read at a glance.
I initially wrote for my own use, but have uploaded it to Garmin’s Connect IQ store, where you can get it for free, in case anyone else finds it useful:
link to apps.garmin.com