How did runners measure distance before GPS watches

Odds are they mostly used time and effort

For myself, growing up I’d ask an adult who drove to approximate a distance to a location based on their driving experience. I think we also got used to running by feel because of a lot of time spent on the track in the spring and so we’d guesstimate distance based on time. Actually, now that I think of it, we mostly ran by minutes instead of miles.

Drove a route in a car to know how far it was and kept a list of routes over time. The more time you spent in one town the longer your list.

Car odometer.

We had maps and measured our training courses that way.
And after your run you wrote your time and distance into a notebook. That was it. No Kudos, no upload of a photo or comment needed.

Those where the times when people where fast.

That's what my HS coach did back in the late 1990s.

I don't know how accurate GPS technology is nowadays. But tbh I bought a cheap bike computer that I calibrated to a 400m track on my mountain bike. That way when I did private coaching sessions, we could run trail repeats/intervals... and the distance was ALWAYS spot on down the exact 1-meter.

I use that same bike/computer combo to mental keep track of mile markers on my normal running routes. Eg, first 400m of my main run is at particular tree in my neighborhood, 800m is right when I pass the dock by the lake, 1609m is right at a tree by this house where their dog is always excitedly waiting to bark at me but he never does bc he just seems to think "oh, he's just that runner who comes by here all the time.. no biggie, i'll leave him alone and bark at the next MFer instead" 🐶

This

Minutes run divided by 7 = miles run. Of course we used a sun dial to measure the minutes, so the precision was usually off a bit.

I generally ran for a length of time. Could (and did) explore new routes all the time.

I normally traced the route I was going to run or had run with a piece of thread on a printed map, then measured the length of the thread and referred to the scale on the map to find the distance.

Now, I trace the route on Google Maps and it tells me the distance to the nearest 0.1 mile, which is good enough.

I have never owned a GPS watch. Yes, I'm old.

Yes average finishing times were faster, but much fewer people ran. Back when fewer people did it, those that did were relatively dedicated to it compared to the masses of today. So we can't just look at average times as proof that old training was better.

Honestly but feel and best guess. I liked running before the GPS.

True story, I ran for an old school coach in college. We only ran with GPS’s once a week maybe. Our coach would estimate our pace and distance and be close to spot on to what the GPS said. His feel for fitness and running knowledge was incredible.

Workouts like 20mins easy, 20 medium, 20 hard. He have all 11 miles splits all spot on to what we ran. Fartleks too, like 20x1-1 on a golf course. He’d guess almost the exact paces and distance we ran each min.

How do pacesetters nail the pace? Getting a feel for it.

Usually we'd run some distance that everyone said was "7 miles" for example. You'd run it all year at 45 minutes and then one day you'd pop a 42 minutes and think "no way that's 7 miles", get in the car and check it with the odometer. Sometimes you'd find out you were faster than you thought, other times you'd find out you'd been slower than you thought all year.

After a while you know your pace within a few seconds a mile. Then you can go out and measure your runs by running for a certain amount of time.

I believe I saw an article in the 80s that Runners World did a test and checked odometer vs perceived pace, and then verified it with a wheel. Perceived pace was more accurate than a car odometer, and actually proved to be pretty close. I still think my perceived pace is more accurate than my GPS watch.

15 years ago it was Gmap Pedometer

Wheel measuring

Car odometer

Printed map with scale and string

Conventional knowledge of local distances (not always accurate and varied based on competing yardsticks)

Guesstimates based on effort

In short, everything stated above. I was in high school 99-03, shortly before GPS watches became commonplace but after MapQuest (etc.) was widely available, and these were the general methods we used. Was the loop through the local park where we ran repeat 1ks actually 1000 meters? Was it short? Was it long? I don’t know and I’m not sure it mattered since we ran it enough that we knew if we were improving or stagnating or getting sick. (I also can’t ever know now, since they carved up some of the meadow into soccer fields with semi-permanent bleachers so the old paths don’t exist anymore). Map My Run was still a few years away.

Marcus O’Sullivan spoke at the running camp I went to and got me interested in heart rate monitors. That plus time seemed valuable enough for me (and I had a big breakthrough after 4-6 months of using it during all kinds of workouts and slowing down or speeding up as needed). A friend and younger teammate was trying to convince everyone that GPS watches would be the future and I guess he was right because now someone can’t imagine life before them so they started this thread. But I still think the HR monitor is a heck of a lot more useful than the GPS function if you’re really trying to monitor your effort in real time.

I used the Thomas Guide scale to get a rough estimate in high school, or ran routes that we used in practice on my own time since they were pre-measured by the coach. In college, I used the Thomas Guide, car odometer, and our team practice routes.

There used to be these HUGE books with EVERYONE's phone number in it. They were called phone books. Actually that is pretty crazy now that I think about it. In these books were these things called MAPS.

Also...jones counter on a bike, car odometer, '7:00 pace' or whatever your easy pace was, or just routes passed down from person to person.

You usually didn't have mile splits. You would use checkpoints:

1. In front of the Colgate plant

2. Manhole cover bottom of the hill

3. Intersection at Loomis

Those were my mile markers for an often repeated 3mi 'trial' we did in HS.

Alan