I know people who have set a goal for themselves, for example sub 78 minutes for a half marathon, The person runs, say 78 minutes 30 seconds, but claims the course was 13.3 miles according to their GPS. After the race is over the person then boasts of how they technically met their goal of a sub 78 minute race.
This has happened more than once in some of the circles I find myself within.
Anyone else? Are GPS devices ruining competitive road running and racing times?
My GPS watch doesn't measure accurately all the time it gets messed up on races with a lot of trees so I don't pay that much attention to the distance it tells me, I just look at the average pace and try to keep that constant.
GPS isn't ruining races, its ruining people who think they are some pin point 120% accurate tracker. And they also stress over pointless metrics they provide like stride length, verticle oscillation, ground contact time and other nonsense no hobby jogger needs to analyze
My GPS told me that I was running 4:32 pace for the first 2 miles of an easy run last week. I've also had it tell me that I was running 10:20 or so for a similar effort on the same route. I trust course measuring much more than my state of the art POS.
No, it's not ruining the case for PRs. Those people are simply being disingenuous (being generous to them). They'd find a different way to falsely claim accomplishments if they didn't have GPS watches to assist in this way.
GPS are ruining people wrote:
GPS isn't ruining races, its ruining people who think they are some pin point 120% accurate tracker. And they also stress over pointless metrics they provide like stride length, verticle oscillation, ground contact time and other nonsense no hobby jogger needs to analyze
Don't forget about such useless features as the recovery time estimator and virtual racer.
My GPS watch is more accurate than whoever measures about half the 5K road races I've run. Not exaggerating. Talk about ruining PRs when you have to jog an extra 100m after the finish line to get to 3.1.
reality czech wrote:
My GPS watch is more accurate than whoever measures about half the 5K road races I've run. Not exaggerating. Talk about ruining PRs when you have to jog an extra 100m after the finish line to get to 3.1.
Inaccurate race courses certainly do exist and are definitely a problem these days as race directors try to cut costs – this a related (but different) topic
No matter what your watch says, the only time that counts is the one on the results sheet.
I do worry that some people use their training paces to base race targets on, not realising that they may have a GPS device which is giving them a misleading impression of their pace (and then pace themselves badly in the race as a consequence).
I know so many tools who list PRs on Strava based on what their watch says. One guy ran around a track until his watch registered 5k and claimed a 5k PR. I think he ran 11 laps approximately.
This category of person never seems to actually race for real, though. They know they're frauds ...
I don't think that is too much of an issue. My guess is that lots of people still do their workouts on a track as much as on the roads, so they should get some accurate feedback there. Even if they do their workouts exclusively on the roads, we are talking about a relatively small margin of error - maybe a couple of seconds per mile on pace - which shouldn't cause people to blow up too badly.
The bigger issue, of course, is people basing their race efforts on workout results instead of basing their workout paces on race results. The former should only happen at the start of a season or after a break unless you are fairly experienced and have a good sense of what shape you are in.