Sorry to bring up topic again, but I was given a Garmin Forerunner 110 for early Christmas present. I have always been a guy who preferred training on trails with with heavy tree coverage. My general rule of thumb was 10 miles in 70 minutes.
I was a little surprised when I used it for the first time today. It gave me 10 miles in 1:13, and had a couple of my mile splits thrown in around 7:50. Can anybody advise what their experience has been with this product in the woods? Thanks...
unless your trail is super-windy (like lots of turns, not lots of wind), then i think the garmin is still pretty accurate. Even if your trail is completely covered in trees, an out and back should still read the exact same distance (and obviously same time, so by default, same pace) as long as it picks up the last point.
my runs in the woods are upwards of 2 minutes slower than the roads, you just have to accept it. youre not any worse of a runner for running an 8:30 mile on slow rocky hilly trails. its the same idea as a treadmill. crank the treadmill up to 15 miles per hour and run for an hour. how far have you run? 0 meter. you just ran infinity-minute-pace by the same logic as running 8:30 pace on trails, even if it was 7:00 effort.
I've found that even moderate hills dramatically slow my training pace my garmin can be ticking over at 7:10 mile after mile and then when I hit a hill, suddenly it says I am running 7:40s.
point is, you may just be running unevenly because of hills on your routes, more than you think.
I have no view on how leaves affect the machine.
agip wrote:
I have no view on how leaves affect the machine.
i have run the exact same run through the woods in summer (leaves) and fall (no leaves) and the two were the same distance plus or minutes 5 hundreths or so. in my experiences, the same trend showed in cloudy vs clear weather. i havent tried a known route on a super cloudy/stormy day, much less in the woods.
Upload your workouts to Google Earth, zoom in and see how true the readings fit to your trails. Hopefully, you can find your trails by zooming in close enough. I wouldn't be surprised if it shows some perfectly straight lines in the densest sections of the forest that you run in, indicating that some mileage is being missed.