How did runners measure distance before GPS watches

I still use that about three times a year if I run a cool route and my GPS is way off. GPS is far from perfect, especially in hilly areas or forests with lots of curves.

I also think the run for X minutes and divide by 7 was our go-to technique in college.

Odometer on moms minivan.

drive their running route's first using car odemeters?

a bike with the mechanical odometer affixed to the front fork near the hub.

Yes this!! For all the "usual" routes

Run 6min pace for an hour, you get 10 mi!

70's runner here. I used 3 methods:

* guesstimate based on time effort - you'd adjust your guess over time

* A street map and string - works reasonably with in .25 to .50 miles accuracy.

* car odometer - you usually can measure your exact route in a city and not good if you off-road it.

* could also use a bike, but I never did

We tended to focus on time rather than distance for runs and pickups and tempos. So, we'd take a guess at our pace and get a rough estimate of distance.

I will say that road races back in the day were very hit or miss in terms of the accuracy of the distances. Some guy would drive his car around with a can of paint and do mile markers, and there were times when that was way off. But, as I remember we didn't care as much about times either - it was more about the competition.

I honestly don't recall that, back in the day, car odometers showed tenths, so measuring by mile was not adequate. I used map & string for decades (I still have the maps from various cities I lived in), but I certainly did the time divided by estimated pace method on occasion.

Don't forget that "south Detroit" is Kilometers 😉

Unexplained health issues have meant that I haven't been able to run since 2008, so I missed the GPS watch thing. Would I have used it? Maybe if I started out with it.

As others have said, though, I typically ran for time (and mostly did some form of an out-and back run or a loop with an out-and-back add on at the end). Running for time made it easy on familiar routes to see if the same perceived effort was giving better or worse results.

If I needed to get in a workout at pace and I wasn't on the track, I would do a measurement using odometer. However, lots of workouts were fartlek or "x" number of hills. It worked really well, and I always liked a more natural feel for everyday runs and non-interval workouts. It was amazing how close we could get the pace--to the point where I knew mile markers on a rails-to trails path must be wrong, where we could hit 29.5 on a 200 on the track, etc.

If I'm ever blessed with the ability to run again, I will stick with minutes rather than GPS.

We just ran and then stopped when we ran enough. We didn’t look at our wrist every thirty seconds, we didn’t upload to Strava to honor ourselves, and we didn’t turn a beautiful thing, our run, into some passionless and overly analytical data capturing event, with all the joy sucked out of it. And believe it or not we still got in shape and ran fast, imagine that. Lose the watch, save the runner.

It seems that in 2024 the guaranteed entry standard for men 18-34 is 2:53. I do remember that it used to be 2:45. Don't have any idea what it was in 1980. There probably wasn't a lottery back then. But basically, these "dedicated" runners would get in no matter the year so it's not like the lottery is cutting their numbers down.

However, I do think it's fair to compare other races. I don't have much time at the moment so here's what I found with a quick search:

Boston Marathon

1980/2023

100th Place: 2:29:14/2:27:18

200th Place: 2:34:26 (All men) /2:31:45 (200th man 2:32:22)

I realized that it's not quite an apples to apples comparison in the NYC marathon because back in 1980 the women's side of the sport wasn't as developed relatively speaking. Therefore, it's best to just compare the first X number of men in each year. I've adjusted for this in the 200th place results. Interestingly, in Boston, the current dedicated men did better than their 1980 counterparts whereas at NY, the 1980 group did better. I'm curious about why. Could the weather have played a part and Boston is more accurate or perhaps NY is more accurate? Maybe we should take something like 5 year spans to compare.

Regardless, I also was surprised when reading about past runners actually finishing faster than current runners when I read it on this board years ago. And not only was training knowledge less developed but shoe technology, nutrition (both during training and in-race), clothing materials (cotton must have been horrible!), watches (how many splits could you keep on a 1980 watch? None???), etc were not as good back then.

If you want to check other years, I'd be interested to see. Please don't show me that in 1940 they were also better than now!!! :)

For a while, I used Google Earth to measure some of my routes.

This was in the mid-2000s, just before GPS watches were widely available. I knew where km markers were based on landmarks.

MapQuest in the late '90s, odometers, and then MapMyRun (manual mouse dragging for quite a few minutes in the day) in the late '00s. And also trail maps from the local parks...