How did runners measure distance before GPS watches

Ran the same courses over and over, figured what my pace felt like, and did math.

Back in the day I was fairly accurate with the routes that I ran. One was to use my cars odometer to measure courses I did. I did lots out outs and backs so that was fairly accurate. When I couldn't measure something I could pretty much tell what pace I was running and based it off of that. I used 7:30 pace as my default pace. So an hours run was close to 8 miles. If I was "jogging" then a 25 minute run I would just call 3 miles. When I first started running back in the late 70's my first route was a loop course. I called it 3 miles. Decades later when I went home and had a GPS watch I ran it and it turned out to be just over a 5K, so in my mind I knew that what I was running back in the day was within a 1/2 mile or so so more or less.

Way more fast people now. And don't give me the 'it's the shoes!'... We had more sub 4 high schoolers from 2010-2019 (before super spikes) than we had from 1776-2009.

Optimistic estimation - a running group I joined just as Garmins were becoming a thing didn't want to know what my prehistoric now but cutting-edge then Forerunner 101 reported their regular routes distances to be after being dismayed the first time.

The way you did it back in the day is divide the time you ran by 6. That way you could claim you ran 100 miles a week when you really only ran 85.

We estimated, we fudged it, we inflated our weekly mileage. Lots of mental gymnastics and rounding up to the nearest whole number.

If someone tells you they were running "100 mile weeks" any time before 2005, they were probably doing more like 85 mpw.

There were a variety of ways you'd measure distance. If I wanted to be really precise I'd get a map and use the scale of miles, maybe using a piece of string or a small edge of paper to work around the bends and curves. Sometimes I'd use the car odometer. Those were not always completely accurate, turns out car makers sometimes deliberately set them to measure a wee bit short so that if you were calculating your mpg it would look good but I'd just add a we bit more distance. Sometimes you knew the exact distance to a place. It was exactly a mile from my house to my old grade school and a shade under seven miles to a park on the other side of town which itself was a mile around. Sometimes I'd just mostly know how fast or slow I was running, e.g., in my best years I was always pretty much around six minute pace on a normal day so if it took me about an hour to do a particular run I'd count it as ten miles, if it took seventy to seventy five minutes I'd call it eleven. Obviously most of this was not as precise as a GPS would be but unless I was running a time trial I didn't care.

Life was so primitive! I would use the car odometer, but I also like variety in my routes. So every drive in my area resulted in making mental notes about certain roads.

Local cross country teams would conveniently mark miles on popular routes. They still do occasionally.

It was a combination of running routes that everyone agreed were a certain distance and, if running somewhere new, elapsed time divided by 7 in high school, 6.5 in college.

We had two regular routes we would do -- one everyone said was 5 miles, the other 6 miles. Years later I ran both with a GPS. Both were 5.5 miles.

Just a random stat from a random road race. In 1978 a better than average yet mediocre 15K time finished 334 out of 2204 runners. That same time this year at the same race finished 336 out of 11,805. So not necessarily faster or slower at the top but a whole lot more slower runners overall.

I purchased a tiny wheel measuring device that I could use to measure distances on curves and around corners on maps. I first tried it on well-known routes and found it to be quite accurate. I probably still have it somewhere, but haven't used it since "Google Earth" came out.

Elites are faster today. Hobby joggers were faster then. The ones who just want to take a selfie with their finishers medal didn't run back then.

Funny but good question. Real answer is it didn’t matter much. We weren’t so OCD in the 70s and 80s. Or you jumped in your car and measured before or after. And finally long time runners knew their approx pace and you simply estimated based on pace.

I graduated high school in 2004 and didn’t get back into running until 2020. The biggest changes for me:

1. GPS watched. As mentioned I used to car to measure out road routes but trails were a total guess and I realize now I was probably way overestimating my distance/pace on the trails back then.
2. We used to do all our runs in cotton t shirts and friggin’ basketball shorts and boxers in the late 90’s/early 2000’s! What were we thinking? I know it wasn’t just me because they talk about D1 runners in RWTB wearing basketball shorts.
3. Road races now giving out nice running clothes/hats rather than crappy cotton t-shirts

The denominator is larger now so while the times of top runners are faster than they were in the 80s, the percentage of competitive runners is smaller. I have some race results from a 10 miler in around 1981. There were over 150 people who broke 60. The slowest person was 81. You don't see race results like this anymore.

The same way I do now.

Run for however many minutes, estimate my pace and figure the miles from there.

I tried a GPS watch years ago, but kept forgetting to charge it. It's annoying to get ready to run and the watch has no power.

So I just went back to the Timex Ironman watch. You only need distance accuracy for intervals/repeats. There is a path near me with half mile markers.

Th good thing about no GPS watch is that you don't know or care about your easy pace.

Prior to GPS, I'd drive my most common route in my car and note the mileage. After running that route many times, I'd learn my average pace by dividing minutes per mile, on easy runs, tempo runs, and so on. That way if I wanted to do a new route I could estimate my distance by the time it took me to run at a certain effort.

It worked well enough to know daily and weekly mileage with reasonable accuracy.

We used a slide ruler. Put our shoes on with a shoe horn. And drank nothing but water during marathons.

I probably used every "old" method mentioned here at least once. You would also have routes that were "known" to be X miles, and the fact that they were X miles was told to you by the seniors when you were a freshman, and as you got older you guided the younger guys on those routes and told them they were X miles. Based on times run, you could be confident that your alleged 15 mile route was not 8 miles or something way way off, but it could easily have been 14 miles or 16 miles, or maybe 14.5 or 15.7 or who knows. This usually only applied to easy run routes, for loops used for workouts usually the coach would wheel it or drive it earlier in the day to make sure we weren't cheating ourselves.