You can’t control the lights, but you can control how you run your watch. If you want your watch to give you reliable and accurate pacing in real-time, you need to pause at red lights.
It’s not perfect but it’s the best way to compare your training over time, apples to apples.
If I’m running 7min/mile pace but get stopped at a crosswalk for two minutes, that’s going to throw me off whenever I go back and look at a progression.
Some devices and services have “moving time” but it’s imperfect. You basically need to stand perfectly still, which isn’t a good idea either.
You can’t control the lights, but you can control how you run your watch. If you want your watch to give you reliable and accurate pacing in real-time, you need to pause at red lights.
It’s not perfect but it’s the best way to compare your training over time, apples to apples.
If I’m running 7min/mile pace but get stopped at a crosswalk for two minutes, that’s going to throw me off whenever I go back and look at a progression.
Some devices and services have “moving time” but it’s imperfect. You basically need to stand perfectly still, which isn’t a good idea either.
Maybe you're right -- when I'm running the streets, I run on feel so I don't even wear a watch. I used to track my pace with a regular watch just by looking at the time and knowing how long a block is. But it makes more sense if you have a GPS watch.
On the other hand, the recorded pace doesn't seem very meaningful if you're frequently stopping, which would allow you to recover each time.
The halfway house to not wearing a watch is doing your runs by feel and only reviewing stats afterward - pace, HR, cadence etc. In particular, I find easy run pace (run by effort, not the watch) to be an excellent measure of fatigue and training load. Stopping at the lights removes variance.
If your easy runs are so hard that the “recovery” you get from 30 seconds at a red light is meaningful, you’re taking your easy runs too hard. And if it’s not an easy run, why would you do it on a route with stoplights?
Obviously there's no recovery at a stoplight, easy runs are not meant to be stressful. But mechanics can change with fatigue, which sometimes means that easy pace - an actual honest easy effort - is slower on some days than others.
Of course if you run all your easy runs at exactly 7min pace rather than by effort then that won't tell you much.
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