Your GPS watch can be a great tool. However, there are times when, as a tool, it can mislead you. What is one of those instances? When youโre using it on the track. In this article, weโll delve into what the issue is, how that might cause problems, and the best way to use your watch on the track instead.
The Problem
Your GPS watch works to show you your pace by gathering multiple data points about your location throughout your run and calculating how fast it took you to get from one point to another assuming a straight line.
Unfortunately, on a track, when weโre making tight turns ever 100m, our watches struggle (to varying degrees) to capture the truth path that we ran. As a result, it can miscalculate our pace and distance run.
What This Can Lead To
At a bare minimum, itโs giving you false feedback on your pace of running. If the goal for getting on the track is to be running a locked pace and specific efforts, youโre not getting the information you need to do that if youโre relying on your watch. My experience is they typically overestimate how quickly youโre running, so for many people this means they slow down and donโt run as fast as they were scheduled to.
However, for those who have โauto-lapโ features turned on or have a workout pre-loaded onto their watches, this will also mean your watch might stop recording your split at the wrong time, typically before youโve completed the rep.
The Solution
While Garmin and Coros have both released a โtrack modeโ that is reasonably accurate assuming itโs calibrated properly. The simplest answer is to just strip down the technology a little bit and capitalizing off the fact that if youโre in Lane 1 of a track, you know exactly how far youโre running and the goal time.
Want to read more about how to better use your watch on the track? Find it in The Training Club!