Urban runners: why do you stop your watch at a red light?

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.

ok

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No. I don’t care about my time on a training run. I do those on feel.

if I’m worried about accurate splits or doing a tempo I go to the path

You seem to be asking, why wear a watch?

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.

I never stop my watch because I always forget to resume it.

Intelligence is not your strength. They do it because they are timing the amount of time spent running.

Set it for Auto Pause. Problem solved. It stops and restarts itself.

Only problem with that,is if it loses signal occasionally it thinks you've stopped and time/pace is all over the place.

This. It goes back to pre-GPS days. An hour run with 5 minutes of standing at intersections or train crossings isn't an hour run.

This is one of the dumbest threads ever created and the ratio of downvotes to upvotes gives me faith in the masses at Letsrun.

It’s okay, not everyone has the capacity to understand everything, but you are special in your own way.

I don't. They sure don't stop the clock in a race if you stop running, so time the time from start to finish is what counts.

ohh no, you can't break that Strava record for 50-54 old men in the 200-215 weight division if you pause your watch.

To know the duration of time I was running.

How is this confusing?

And isn’t that the reason that people have worn running watches since the first digital Timex??

lol