How did runners measure distance before GPS watches

My father used a pedometer, bike odometer, or car odometer, or he'd look up public records of roads and stuff. We had a "mile tree" growing up, which was approximately a mile from our house in the rural NC countryside

I did a lot of running on a bike trail with mile markers every 1/2 mile. After doing miles at multiple efforts, I just got to know my pace. Then i started biking and if i was not on the marked trail, i could mark off segments using this.

But i kind of think i overestimated my speed and distance back then.

I used mapmyrun to plan routes

Get off my lawn! I mean, times are soooo much slower now.

I largely did the same....car odometer and street maps. There was a paved bike path that someone had marked every 0.1 miles for 3 miles. Most of my high school's training routes had been either marked out or run so many times that there was very good estimate of the distance.

This is similar to the origin of the University of Wisconsin’s “Badger Miles”’except you divided by 8. the idea was to incentivize slow recovery runs so you got no additional credit for running fast.

Garmin released it's first GPS watch when I was in HS. Was obviously outside my budget. But around that same time, Google bought a company and rebranded as Google Earth which I used to measure the loop I ran in. For other routes, I would just measure the distance after every run. Fun times.

Car odometer, online mapping software or, if I was being fancy, a calibrated pedometer. But most runs were on greenways with quarter mile markers, so I would just map out the distance to the trailhead and then run “x” number of posts out and back. The other alternative was park trails where loops/paths/trails were measured by the park service.

Started as a runner at age 10. Then mostly I ran the same routes for easy runs without knowing the distance but timed.Sometimes then I ran on measured routes and of course when quality workouts on track no problem to know exact distance. When age 22 I moved to an area with mainly measured routes ( by wheel measuring) and my favourite almost daily route an 8 km ( 5 mile) I ran 1-6 laps. My normal easy pace then at 4 min / km ( 6:30 / mile) when at shape 14:20/ 29:51 min at 5000m/ 10000m.

🇸🇪🧙🏼‍♂️🇸🇪

With my car, making a note of me markers

Using a bicycle with an odometer also worked before GPS. Basically the odometer was calibrated to the wheels circumference and was pretty accurate. Could bike on a lot of paths that a car couldn’t go. But before that just ran on time for trails etc.

I had a few local routes that I had measured by bicycle odometer, or by mapping each segment in Google Earth. anything else was by feel and by roughly dividing time run by 7:00 or 7:30.

The ubiquity of GPS watches is really only a feature of the past ~10 years, and I wonder if it has at least a small impact on the drop in times (along with shoes and training techniques, ofc). The effect has been that when traveling, you can still perfectly measure your efforts and get in solid work, without necessarily being on your home routes or with access to a track.

Is this seriously a question now? God, I feel old.

Yes, a lot more people run.
I didn't say that the old training was better but the people who actually trained got very good results.

From my observation with all of my running group runners is, that most people have actually no idea how to have a decent training for a solid marathon. It seems like this knowledge got totally lost. I am not talking sub 2:30 times just normal stuff between 3 and 4 hours.

If u don't mind me asking how old are you?

Hate to be the one to tell you but people were not faster in the 80s than they are today.

"Badger miles" (time run ÷ guesstimated pace)

Before I had a garmin I used a stopwatch and google maps. You can literally trace your exact route on google maps length and the stopwatch literally tells you how long you have been running for. For reps I still like to use google maps to measure reps of 600m etc. Like from a certain tree beside the path to the Kara Goucher billboard for example

If you already know all this why are you asking? Go find something to do.

This.

In high school, I ran about 8 minutes per mile on easy days. So, a 24-minute route would be assumed to be 3 miles, a 48 minute route is 6 miles, etc. Then I would run the courses at different effort levels and see if results lined up. Did a 3 mile course take 18 minutes or less at a hard(ish) effort, etc.? For purposes of tracking mileage in my training log, it was close enough.

For anything requiring a truly precise pace (e.g. a 3*mile in 5 minutes), I would run it on a track.