Inaccuracies with GPS Watches: How to best use the data to optimize your training

Finn Melanson [00:00:10]: Hello, fellow runners. I'm your host, Finn Milanson, and this is the Run to the Top podcast, the podcast dedicated to making you a better runner. With each and every episode, we are created and produced by the expert team of coaches@runnersconnect.net, where you can find the best running information on the internet, as well as training plans to fit every runner and every budget. How much should you trust your GPS watch? If you regularly run with a GPS watch, it can be good to ask yourself how much are you using it and relying on it during your training? Does the data telling you that you are unproductive or overreaching make you question everything you've been doing? What about heart rate? Is that really high reading actually true? GPS watches have come a long way. They have improved greatly over the years, becoming more and more accurate. However, they still aren't perfect, and we see this often when we step on the line to race. Inevitably, there is a discrepancy between the course distance and your watch, which is right on. This week's Coaches Chat, coaches Michael and Andy dig into GPS watches and cover some of the most common questions or concerns we get, plus metrics we recommend tracking. They also dig into how to have a healthy balance between the data you consume and the effort you put in. You don't want to miss this one. Lagoon specializes in making pillows designed specifically for runners and athletes to help you optimize your sleep and recovery. Learn more@lagoonsleep.com top and get a 15% discount. If you've tried running with headphones before but didn't like how they felt, then you really need to give oledance Headphones a try. You'll be amazed at the difference their open ear design makes. Head to oledance.com RTT to learn more.

Michael Hammond [00:02:07]: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the RunnersConnect. Coach Chat. Coach. Michael Hammond here. Head coach of Runners Connect. I'm here with Coach Andy Cozarelli, Olympic trials marathon qualifier. We're here to talk a little bit about GPS watches, metrics data, and it's funny because I say that and it almost sounds like it's going to be this really dry topic, but Andy and I discussed beforehand, we really want to talk about this in a not necessarily. We're not going to necessarily dive super deep into the exact data. What we want to talk about is more how it affects you, like how you can use it or whether you should perhaps not use it at points. It's a question. A topic that comes up all the time with our own athletes is just how much should I use this stuff? Garmin is trying to take over our lives in every way. They're trying to give us metrics on every single thing. How much of that should we use? Is it worthwhile to really know all this stuff? Are we in an overabundance of data at this point? So that's what we want to talk about today. So I'm going to go over to Andy and she's going to kind of introduce the topic a little bit, start talking about some of the different stuff with the watches and metrics and everything, and we'll get into it. Andy, go ahead.

Andie Cozzarelli [00:03:13]: Yeah, so my experience is mostly going to be with the Garmin watches. I haven't used the coros, but I think generally they have fairly similar features in terms of what data they're giving you. It might be terms differently, there might be some different stuff that's really thrown in there. But I think the watches nowadays, especially those forerunners and all the ones that are designed for runners, are giving you so many things. I mean, we've got what's this like, overreaching. It tells you if you're maintaining or doing something that's productive, I think is the word, or unproductive. So it's giving you all of this data. We know that a lot of them nowadays have heart rate built into them pretty much consistently. There's Vo Two data that it's telling you it's telling to tell you what your Vo Two max is. So there's all these different metrics that are actually built into the watches these days, which is, I think, a huge change in shift from the original GPS watches, which Michael and I were just talking before we started about how he's never really trained with one. And honestly, I didn't train with a GPS watch until I was a post collegiate. So we'll get into that a little bit about kind of some of those differences that I saw personally and just how that changed my training a little bit. And so we can kind of get into the weeds a little bit on that too. I think the first thing we are going to talk about, we hear a lot of questions on some of the data that's out there. I think that one of the first things that always comes up for a lot of athletes after they race is that the race was long. And so my GPS watch, it says that the race was long. And I think that that is honestly something that's, like, it's difficult to know for sure. I think GPS watches are not 100% accurate. They're pretty close, but there's always going to be a factor of error in terms of the measuring of it. And then on top of that, the races that are measured, if they are USATF measured and certified and all of that stuff is in place, the likelihood of the course being wrong is very low. They typically are measuring, though, from the tangent, so the most absolute shortest route. So if you're not taking the tangents or if you're not able to, that's going to add distance. But regardless, it's really about that time, the finish time, what the results say. So that's what we're going off of. That's what we got to go off of. So sometimes I had a coworker when I used to work in the engineering sector and he was a big runner and he was doing all of his training runs with his watch on a trail around here. And he said when he got into the race, he was watching his splits on his watch, only not really using mile markers, not paying attention to the course specific stuff. And by his standard, he was nailing his racing plan. I mean, his GPS had him perfectly, perfectly on pace. And then he got to the finish line and he realized he looked down, that his watch had beeped way earlier and he missed his mark by 30 seconds a minute, something like that. And so we have to be really conscious of not letting the GPS and the times and the paces that it's giving us be what we're focusing on entirely. Because like I said, the race is going to be probably more accurate than your watch. If there's a lot of GPS signals picking up, if there's a lot of tall buildings, if there's trees, if there's things that are going to influence the GPS, then it's going to be really difficult to know is it accurate, like is my watch right or is the course right? And most likely we've got to go with the default of the races, correct? So I'm sure Michael, you've probably seen this a lot.

Michael Hammond [00:07:04]: Yeah, it had to be an engineer in your story too. It's always the type A engineers. I'm talking to all of you out there. I know, I get it. At our retreats, I remember we used to do one of our retreats in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. That's kind of where it all got started with our retreats. And we would always go to this place, it's called Moses Cone Park, incredible park in Blowing Rock. And I would always tell people ahead of time, I remember the first time I did it, I would always tell people ahead of time, look, I know you're all wearing your GPS watches, but we're going to be on these trails that have like these switchbacks GPS watches are notoriously inaccurate out here. Every single time that I've either run with one or I've seen other people run with one out here, it's terrible. And I swear I looked out to just a sea of blank expressions on people's faces when I said that. And here was the crazy thing. I'm looking across. I'm looking across at all the athletes that are there, the campers, and they're all giving me these blank faces. And I look over at the other coaches that are there who are also giving me a blank expression. It just goes to show just how reliant everybody is on GPS and inevitably what happened when we were out there. Inevitably everybody goes out and next thing you know, you have people running for 4 hours because they're trying to hit their mileage when I had told them ahead of time, look, your GPS watch is not accurate. But as I said, even some of our coaches were guilty of this. I remember we did this run out there, and I was running with one of our coaches. I wasn't fit by any means, but I wasn't in bad shape, and we were coming down. So when you do this run, you go like it's like a gradual uphill, and then on the way back, it's just this gradual downhill. You can really bomb down this thing. And I remember we were going hard enough to where each of us were breathing pretty hard on a downhill. So that means you're trucking a little bit. And again, I'm calling out one of our other coaches. This other coach says to me, like, oh, we're only going, I want to say, like, 845 pace, 845 per mile pace. And I was just like, no, look, I know I'm not as fit as I once was, but false. We're not going 845 pace bombing down this hill. There's no way. It's just not accurate. So I think what that was, that was like a big lesson for me in terms of just how reliant people have become on GPS, just like this inability to sort of feel it out, just this inability to realize that it's not always accurate. It's funny to me that Garmin or one of the other companies, they'll release their newest line and they'll be like, this time it's 99 point blah, blah, blah accurate. And it's like, well wait, what about last time? I thought it was like, perfectly accurate last time. So it's like, if it keeps improving, that means that it's not perfect, and it's definitely not perfect. If you go run on popular, well known, well routed roads, it's probably going to be pretty accurate. But if you're out on trails, if you're on dirt roads that maybe aren't as well mapped, the odds of it being perfectly accurate are minimal. So I think that's something that I've really learned working with runners nowadays is that really this has been a phenomenon, I'd say, over the last ten, maybe 15 years before that kind of everybody had their basic time. X so in terms of what you asked about, things that impact the accuracy, like I said, any sort of trails, anything that's like, off the beaten path a little bit is definitely going to affect it. We could get into this, but I think basically what people need to know about how your GPS watch measures you is it's not literally every single moment getting your exact speed at that point. It's getting your speed at points that can lead to a ton of inaccuracy. So regardless of that, I think that you should definitely trust something more like a race. If you're not to the point where you can trust a race course, especially one that's certified like a big marathon, if you're not to that point, then your first step is you just need to realize that that stuff is way more accurate. And you should definitely go by that. You got to let go a little bit. You got to step back and realize that this stuff is not accurate. And I think that same theme will go throughout this conversation about this stuff just not being perfect. They do a great job with the satellites and stuff, but it's just not perfect.

Andie Cozzarelli [00:11:29]: Right? And I think it's just there needs to be a balance with all of the stuff that we'll talk about. But even like the pacing, it's great. I think it's good to use the GPS for people who are trying to make sure they're not running too hard. Because I think if you're running generally like an easy run, then it's going to be a really good tool to help us to ensure that we're keeping the effort pretty easy. Because we're not looking for a perfect splits. We're not looking for that when we're running easy. So I found that that was something to help to ensure that that's happening. When I first started using a GPS watch, it was the opposite extreme. So when we ran NC State, we always ran for time. I had a Timex watch like Michael mentioned, and we just assumed that a seven minute pace, nine times out of ten, we weren't running seven minute pace, but we just assumed we were. And so when we would go for easy runs, say we had 7 miles, we'd run for 49 minutes, whatever distance we were doing, we just ran that. And so that was kind of what I gotten used to. So when I actually got a GPS watch and realized I was not running seven minute pace, it was like this, just like, oh my God, am I slower? Because I didn't get a watch until after I'd graduated. So I was in a different phase of life and I just was like, I must be a lot less fit than I was in college. And so I would just kind of hammer myself into needing to run that seven minute flat pace on all my easy runs. And I was not running well. I was not running well at all. And so I finally was like, I'm just going to put this watch aside. Let's go back to my timex running for time. Started running with a friend who she was a college runner. She had taken some time off, she had injury and stuff and she was getting back into it. So we were taking it easy and I just started running with her and I wasn't worried about my pace and I had my best season. So in some ways, the GPS watch is helpful in ensuring that we're taking it easy. But if you find yourself using it in a way where you're stressing about the fact that you're not running fast enough, especially on your easy days, then it's not helpful. So we have to have a good balance in how we're using it and how it's affecting how we feel about what we're doing, because we need to always try to keep some positivity to it. And so I think that's a big factor here is that this pace, one, it's not always going to be super accurate. If you ever have your pace on your watch, on the is it the instantaneous pace or whatever?

Michael Hammond [00:14:02]: Yeah, it's like really real time.

Andie Cozzarelli [00:14:05]: Yeah, you'll see those points in time, it'll be like 1 minute, it'll say nine minute pace, 1 minute, it'll say six minute pace. And so that just shows us kind of like, it's not pulling from it's not going to be accurate all the time. It tries to average that out. And so that's where some of those differentials will be. If you've ever done, like, an out and back on something, you may come back and it's shorter. You may come back and it's longer. And so that's where some of that's coming down is that at some point it just didn't pick up something correctly, and that's where that's coming from. And so trying to have some balance there and how much we rely on it for, that is going to be a really good, helpful tool there. I'd say that the second thing that I think we hear pretty often is the HR. So your heart rate, what is going on with it? I think the wrist based, if you've got the chest strap, that's going to be a lot more accurate in terms of what's going on. But if you are just relying on the wrist based, it's going to have some inaccuracies. Sometimes it's, like, pretty even sometimes. I've had runs where actually, I think when I was injured earlier this year, I was doing some cross training rides, and my watch was saying that my heart rate was, like, not getting above, like, 100. And I was like and I was pushing pretty hard in the lip to go. I was doing a workout, and it was like, barely pushing 80 or 90. And I was like and I was like, it's on my wrist. And I looked at it, I was like, it's tight. It's, like, fitted right. I don't know what's going on. And so I don't know what caused it to be so low, but then as soon as I hit the cooldown, it finally started jumping up to a more normal heart rate for when I'm on the elliptical. So there's going to be stuff like that. And then we've also seen it where I think that if the watch is a little too loose, it can pick up your cadence. So be aware if you see some really ridiculously high numbers that just don't make sense, look and see what your cadence is. And if they're fairly similar, it could be that your heart rate is not coming through right and it's picking up the cadence. I think the other things are if that heart rate sensor gets damaged in any way. We're also going to see some weird, funky times coming through. Some weird, funky little heart rate readings coming through. So there's a lot of stuff there that's, like the heart rate can be helpful again for helping us to ensure that we're taking things easy enough. But at the same time, we've got to have a balance in how much we rely on that data to completely control how we perform, even during workouts and races and all that stuff. Michael, do you see that pretty often?

Michael Hammond [00:16:51]: Definitely, yeah. I think it's funny. I kind of want to just thinking about the way we're going through this. I do want to stop for a second and remind everybody. Andy and I both agree that GPS watches and all this, it can be useful. By no means are we saying, like, go throw your $700 GPS watch in the trash. It's definitely not saying that. I think each of us are much more prone to jump on the negatives than we necessarily are to jump on the positives, because the negatives are what are the most frustrating, especially, like I said, within our community. I mean, I'm talking about our retreats. I'm talking about when we're coaching people within our community. We see this stuff all the time. So I just want to give that big caveat of, like, it's definitely really useful and I mean to real quick to go through kind of some of the useful things. One of the things Andy mentioned is heart rate. The one thing I'll add to be a little negative, again, is basically what Andy's saying about the wrist based, risk based heart rate is notoriously inaccurate. I would recommend anyone, and I hate telling people to go spend money and stuff like that, but at the same time, if you're trying to really train by heart rate, you got to get the chest trap. You cannot place this much emphasis of your training on something like wrist based heart rate. That's so inaccurate. Like you said, people see that all the time where it won't go above whatever. In your case, Andy, when you were talking about your elliptical workout, that wasn't so bad because you immediately recognized that it was wrong. What if it was only off by 15 beats a minute? Ten beats beats a minute. Now you're sitting there thinking, wow, okay, I'm still going really easy, when in reality, maybe you're in, like, zone three, and you're pushing it way too hard. So get a chest strap. That's definitely a big one. If you're going to train by heart rate, and in terms of when that's best to use, this is something a lot of our athletes at Runners Connect do this, and I love when they do this. They will use heart rate training on easy days only. And the reason they do that is because I think that heart rate training I actually like art rate training. I like artery training. I think it's a good metric. What they do, though, is they'll use it on easy runs because I think heart rate is best when it's as a cap, when it is like a limit, instead of necessarily just having to go within a range. I like when people just do it as a cap. So on easy runs, it's nice because you can just like, set on most watches, you can set the upper limit, so a lot of people will do I'm 33 years old, so I'll do like, set it at like 148 or 147 or something along those lines and just make sure that easy runs are well below that. So that way your watch is beeping at you if you're getting above that. I don't like for people to necessarily always use it on workouts. I'm not saying it can't work. It can, but it can definitely lead to and this is kind of a bigger problem with GPS in general, is that you're just sitting there just constantly checking the watch. Just constantly those of you who aren't watching the video, I'm just like, literally sitting there looking at my watch because that's what we see all the time. It's just constantly looking, constantly checking, because you got to see where that heart rate is. I know you can program this stuff ahead of time, but then it gets complex. Let's say you have to stop at a stoplight or something like that. It just gets really messy. So I like when people use it on easy runs as a limit. I love that. I think that's fantastic. I think that some of the you were talking about the heart rate in terms of some of the metrics that it gives, like resting heart rate, things like that. I think those things can be useful. It's funny, I've gone back and forth on stuff like garmin, stuff like aura ring, I have an aura ring. Stuff like whoop. All these different metrics. I think that I feel very similarly about a lot of these things as I do about GPS in general, and that's that I fear that it's causing people to lose that element of being in tune with yourself, being in tune with your body. Andy, you gave a great example when you were talking about how you all would just go do. I think they call those in college running circles? They call it Badger miles because it started at Wisconsin. The University of Wisconsin team would do all their runs. They wouldn't use GPS or do anything. They would just say, oh, we rans of metapace. They probably were going on the men's team. They were probably going a lot faster. But you guys use that. The reality was you were probably training really intelligently because you weren't really thinking about your pace. You were just kind of going and doing it, and then as soon as you start thinking about it, it activates this anal retentive nature that's in a lot of us. As I said, anyone who's more type A, I hate to make fun of you engineers and people like that because we have a lot of them at Runners Connect. They're going to be mad at me, listen to this, but you guys are the worst with this. I'm sorry. It is what it is, and it just activates this thing in our nature that makes you just so worried about it. I think I've talked about this a lot within our community before, but I love when people like journalists or people will go into training camps in Kenya, and one of the biggest things they always come away with is how little the Kenyans will think about their training. They don't think about it, they just do it. They just get out and run. And whatever the coach of the big squad says to do, they just do it. They really don't think about it. And another thing, they don't really think about it between training. So they train, then they go and relax or they go work or they go be with their family or whatever. And I'm always inspired listening to that because you got this group of people that are the fastest runners in the world who they just train, and then you've got the people in America, mostly in the west, who are just so all over all these metrics and obsessing over it. So I think that as much as we talk about the positives and the things that it can help with at the same time, I think that it's worth it for everybody to at least take a good, hard look at the way you train with this stuff, the way you use it. Is it adding value in terms of is it actually making you a better runner? And I think most people would argue that it is, because it's like, well, I know how long I'm going, I know how fast I'm going and all that. That stuff can be useful, but it really takes some intense self reflection to kind of look at it and say, how much is this hurting me? How much is this making me just sit within my own head all the time and not just kind of let it be, let it flow?

Andie Cozzarelli [00:23:26]: Yeah. And I think that's like, where when we did workouts in college, we only went to places that were that our coaches would measure the distance or the distance markers were there or were on the track. So all of our training became very focused on what the effort felt like. You had no idea when you would start a repeat, you didn't know what pace you were going. It was all based on how the effort felt to know. And oftentimes this is what I used to do. And I know this happens to, I think a lot of runners nowadays is when you're getting into training and you're just starting a new block of training most of the time. My first few intervals I'd start way too quick because I needed to retrain what the paces felt like. And so early on in the season, I would have to really reel myself back in the beginning to ensure I didn't start too quick so that I could build that up and actually be on pace. Because when you start too quick early in a season, you're also going to die a lot faster. You're going to really go back the opposite direction a lot easier because you don't have the threshold, you don't have all those things built up. And so all of the training we did in college was just like we do 1000 repeats, there's a place we used to go, it was a Bark trip trail close to NC State and it was roughly 1000 meters and you didn't have any markers to know like halfway through if you were on pace. So it was really like a guessing game when you started to be like, is this right? Does this effort feel right? And I think that is so important in training to be able to feel that. Because if your GPS watch at the start of a race, especially in these big city marathons isn't picking up correctly, you can't be so fixated on it that that's the only measure that you know to know if you're on marathon pace, you have to be able to figure out does this feel right? Does it feel like I'm going too hard? Any of those things need to be things that you're aware of, of what those efforts feel like. And so I think that's one of the things that where going through training, not having a GPS watch, I was able to develop. And I think when I did get a GPS watch, it negatively affected me initially because of that, just like going from one extreme to the other. But now I've gotten into a space with my GPS watch where I use it, but I don't look at it on my easy runs most of the time because I'm focused on my effort. I'm just kind of knowing that I'm going the distance if I'm running in a space where the GPS is not accurate. And I know that I'll run for time. And so again, it doesn't matter so much what the mileage says. And I know Strava counts all your mileage and everyone is going to see it, but it's fine. It's all going to be fine. At the end of the day, that is what I've been able to develop since beginning a GPS watch, that I'm able to have some balance with it. And now it is valuable for me to be able to track kind of how I've progressed through things. And knowing too, I take it extra easy on my easy days and if that happens to be an 830 pace, great. And if that's what I needed, fantastic. I can look back. At that and be like, hey, look, I survived going way slower than maybe my race pace. And so when I say 830 pace, that's comparative to running going for a goal marathon pace of around 555 something in there. So that pace differential, I think, is huge, and it may be for that pace differential is going to be drastic for people who are a little bit on the faster side compared to people who are maybe a little bit closer to that 1011 minutes mile. But still, knowing that I'm keeping these efforts in the right zone is the important factor. So my pace is out the window a little bit more. But I do like being able to see the data just for my own reminders that it's okay to just kind of ebb and flow through things. So that's been valuable for me. I'd say.

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Michael Hammond [00:29:37]: Cool. No doubt you reminded me when I was in college, my coach would have the same thing. We would do, like these kind of tempo ish runs, and he would have these we had this route that we knew, like, where the markers were. And it was really funny when I feel like I was, I don't know, maybe a sophomore, junior or something, and I realized how convenient they were. It would be like, oh, this pole is the two mile marker. It's like, that's interesting. Or it was like this one particular turn. It was never just, hey, at this random spot of grass, that's where the mile mark it was always so convenient. I was like, this is not accurate, man. There's no way. But it's funny because who cares? We got good workouts. We were improving. You know what I mean? At some point, it was like we didn't really necessarily need to know. And I think that's where that kind of connects back with what I was talking about earlier, how in a way, sometimes from a coaching angle, sometimes I want runners to be this is going to sound like a bit abrasive, but I almost want runners to be dumber in a way. I want runners to be a little bit less intelligent and so alert to what's going on with their training. I want them to almost be a little bit dumber in a way of just like the caveman type thing. Caveman do six mile tempo at medium effort. Caveman do easy run 10 miles. You just kind of get out there and do it without necessarily thinking about it. So I do want to let Andy let's run through some of the different metrics just because I think GPS is definitely the biggest topic with all this stuff, and that's where we should be focused. That's where most people use a lot of this stuff. But let's roll through some of the other metrics just to kind of get through them and talk about them and say whether we think that they're worthwhile. So one of them you talked about that we wrote down is resting heart rate and like, sleep heart rate, things like that. My opinion on that, I think that it connects right back with what we talked about with the wrist heart rate just not really being that accurate. Personally, guys, I would tell everybody to not really trust that stuff. I think that if you look at go do if for any of you who've ever done a sleep test or anything like that, if you go in for an in lab sleep test I did one a few years ago. I have a picture of myself. I was literally covered in these little stickers that have wires poking out of them. I mean, I'm talking about on my head. They have them on your cheeks, they have them by your nose. They have them on your head, they have them on your chest. You are literally like this robot wired machine. And you're going to tell me that your little wristwatch is going to tell you your sleep phases like that does? No chance. It's just not going to happen. I get that maybe it's like reasonably accurate, but it's not going to have that level of accuracy. Just a little aside here. In my opinion, just based on what I know about getting these metrics, if you're going to use a sleep tracker, use an aura ring because your finger is pretty accurate in terms of using it has like SPO two, it has how it reads, the sleep phases that you're in. That's definitely almost certainly just looking at the science of it almost certainly going to be the most accurate of all the sleep trackers. And even then I say that I don't know that there's a lot of value in knowing your exact sleep. Like, to give a personal example, something I found, I used an or ring for a while just to kind of test it out. And I love testing stuff and giving my feedback to our athletes. And one of the things I found was that there's something I've read about this. It's called the no SIBO effect. What it means is that so you have placebo effect. The no SIBO basically means like when you're affected by a variable, but you have nothing to compare it to. The example of this that I found with the or ring was that you'd have a night's sleep and you get up and you check the app, you open it up on your phone and you look at what your sleep was and it gives you a pretty low score. And you're like, oh man, dang. And you just have this cloud hanging over you the rest of the day for no reason other than a little goofy app and a ring around your finger told you that you had a bad night's sleep. What if you didn't have a bad night's sleep? What if it wasn't accurate? What if it was just off that night? Or maybe it slid around your finger a little bit, your fingers. Maybe you had it on a finger where it wasn't super tight around it and it just shifted around a little bit. That's the notesbo effect. And you see that type of thing a lot. We can connect this to one of the next things we want to talk about, which is like, the recovery element that Garmin has. You need X amount of hours to recover. As I said, if you look at what it takes to measure this type of stuff in a laboratory setting like, I talked about sleep testing, but let's look at like Vo two max testing. I've done a Vo two max test. I did it at the first lab at Furman in South Carolina at Furman University. Very intense. You are on a treadmill. You've got lots of wires, you've got tubes, you've got all this stuff. Are you going to tell me that this little wristwatch on your hand is going to be even close to the level of accuracy that that is? Of course not. Of course not. In terms of resting heart rate and stuff like that, I generally don't like people to go too crazy on that stuff because I want people to be more in tune with themselves. If you wake up in the morning and you feel great, you pop out of bed like, heck yeah, let's go for this run. Who cares what your watch tells you? Who cares what your resting heart rate was? Clearly you got a solid night's sleep, and you're going to be all right. Same on the other way. If you wake up feeling like crap and your watch is telling you, oh, man, you did it. You killed it last night. That was great. That's not good either. We don't really want to do that. So I think all these metrics, the recovery metrics with Garmin, the recovery one, I got to crap on a little bit extra. That one is so ridiculous. Andy, I think you'd agree that we'll have people this typically occurs I don't want to pick on them, but this will typically occur with people who are new to Runners Connect, who they're real excited. They've got the GPS watch, and they're starting out, and they're like, I did this workout, and it told me that I need, like, two weeks to recover. And it's like, okay, well, first of all, it's getting used to you. It does take time to fine tune. And second of all, come on. That stuff is just not accurate at some point. I don't know what else to say other than there's no way it's accurate because we've had people trained with us who've trained extremely well, who've recovered extremely well, who've not been injured, who've not had problems, and yet their Garmin watch will have told them, you're overtraining. You are pushing it. You're red line, and this is terrible. Whatever. So I think that's my kind of general overall experience with this stuff is that I'm not saying it can never be useful data. I just see it always. I think that with anything like this, there's benefit and there's cost. And unfortunately, with that, with a lot of those little metrics that come with this stuff, I typically see the cost column a lot bigger than the pros. Andy, give your experience.

Andie Cozzarelli [00:36:49]: Yeah, on the resting heart rate, I feel like I have a little bit different opinion, but mostly in the sense of trends. When you see outliers, I wouldn't put a ton of stock into them. If you see some random metric that's, like, weird, that's really high a lot of times may not be super accurate, but I have, like, from watching what might because I also have aura ring. I've compared it a little bit to my watch. It's typically fairly close, but not on the resting heart. Rate, the sleep, I haven't compared as much. I think that the watch does not pick up as well from the deep sleep and all that stuff. So that's where I saw a little bit more of a difference in the rim and all that, and then the time for sleep, I saw some differences there, but in terms of the resting heart rate, it's fairly close on my watch compared to also the ring. But the reason that I like tracking my resting heart rate is I've seen actually when I had COVID, the days before, leading up, I felt like a little bit I remember going for my runs and feeling like, not great, just kind of felt a little bit, like, off. And then when I actually looked at the watch and it showed my resting heart rate being a little elevated. And when I say a little elevated, I think it was like four or five beats higher than normal, which is where that trend comes into play. It's like, this is a decent deviation higher than my normal, so not just a beat or two. It's a good bit up there. And so I was like, yeah, it's a warm run. It was a long run. So I was kind of, like, not trying to I wasn't really obsessing over it. I just kind of saw it, and I was like, weird, I don't know why that's there. And then two days later, my heart rate was actually down, back to normal, my resting the day that I tested positive for COVID. So, weirdly enough, it was actually sensing that I was getting sick with something two days before, and that's where it was seeing that happen. So it was kind of interesting to see that phenomenon a little bit in my data, being like, all right, recognizing when I could be getting sick and what a trend like that could mean. And so if I see that now, sometimes I'll just be like, all right, let me make sure I'm taking care of my immune system. Let me make sure I'm getting my vitamin D, my vitamin C, and my zinc. And so from that standpoint, yeah, I try to use it for help on that front. The other thing that I recognized, too, is when I was in marathon training back in the fall, there was a week where I just wasn't sleeping well because of I kept getting this post nasal drip that was making me cough all night, and I was not sleeping well. My training, I still felt fine, so still running. And I was just like, no, I feel great. I'm going to keep going. But my ring was giving me data that was showing that I was not recovering well. And, I mean, it makes sense because I could tell it was not sleeping well. And then the end of that, I think it was the next week, my hamstring kind of tweaked. And so it was like, you know what, I probably should have been listening a little bit better to that feedback because body wise, I was just kind of going straight through. I was feeling great, everything was feeling great. It was just that I wasn't sleeping well. It backfired that next week where all of that lack of sleep and lack of recovery really came into play, where I did get injured. I took three days and was able to recover pretty quickly. But it was amazing those three days off that I took. I felt so much better coming off of those few days and I was refreshed. Things felt so much better. And so from that standpoint, when I see the trend starting to kind of really show something more glaring, that's where I try to be a little bit more okay. I need to make sure I'm backing off, because coming from the perspective of somebody who is not good at listening to my body, I am somebody who I like to kind of really push the envelope on things. And so I am not good at being able to back off as much as I should. So recognizing internally when I'm pushing myself too hard, that's where I see that value in knowing if my resting heart rate is showing any trend of like, yeah, you're overdoing it a little bit, let's back that off, let's pull things back and not kind of put ourselves into a well. And so that's where I see resting heart rate being a valuable metric that I like to use because I am that kind of person that really struggles to kind of pay attention to that. But then when you talk about, I think the garmin stuff actually back to the one thing that I would say, resting heart rate wise and even tracking this metric and the sleep stuff in your watch, don't look at it before a race. Do not worry about it if leading into a race, we don't need any metrics to change how we are feeling about our training, how we're feeling going into a race. We just have to be concerned with what our effort is saying. And I think if you look at the data, especially if you don't sleep all the night before, you're going to be freaking out going into the race. And that's not a good way to prepare mentally. We know we need that mental edge in the race day. And if we're doing anything that's going to impact that, then all we have is our physical abilities and we lose ton of our training time or we lose a ton of our racing to that mental stuff that we may have lost. And so I don't look at it in the days landing into a race. I just kind of let it be. I like to have it there so I sometimes will look back at it later just to kind of give myself peace of mind, of like, see, look my ring had terrible metrics going into this race and I performed. So I like to have the data there to look at later, but I do not like to look at it going into race and I think that's important. But then together watch though with the recovery. It's funny because today my watch told me I needed 58 hours of recovery off of my easy run. I mean, I ran 10 miles. I had a hard workout yesterday and a double and lifting so I could tell my legs were tired today. But 58 hours, not really that realistic and not accurate. So that's another thing that I see on the ring is that it doesn't quite understand my activity level. And so it's constantly telling me that I'm too active or doing too much unless I do the recovery. I think there's like an option where you can put in that you're running or something or doing an exercise. I don't ever do that because it's too difficult for me to go in the app and click it and then go for my run immediately after that. I'm not doing that. So it always shows every run that I do as being like a really hard effort and it's not the case. My recovery is going to be doing an easy recovery run of some sort. Not 58 hours of not doing anything based on what my watch is telling me. It's all based in like I don't even know where that metric comes from. But that kind of brings up the whole overreaching and the where it says peaking, not productive, productive, all of these random things. It'll also say detraining, which mindwatch never even told me I was detraining when I was injured. We know I was detraining. I wasn't running and I wasn't actually for periods of time during my recovery, I started to do a little bit more cross training where I was doing workouts and stuff. But at the beginning I was kind of just trying to keep things, trying to rest it and see if I could just get it back faster by rest. So I know I was detrained during that time. My watch didn't tell me at all. It said I was maintaining and I was like, I don't know if I believe that. So there's that that you're going to see that's going to be wrong. The not productive, the productive, I don't even know. I've tried to research where this data comes from and I think it's like a combination of heart rate, maybe just volume over time. Some of this stuff I'm just like I don't know how it's looking at it. Is it looking at trends in your heart rate? I'm not sure, but I think some of that also comes down to is your heart rate data even set right in your watch? So it's coming up with your most of the time, the default setting is like the generic heart rate recommendations based on your age, which is what? Your age? Whatever it is. I'm not sure. Yeah, which is everybody's different. That's not a great calculation for every person to reach. So half the people's data may not be even be pulling the right heart rate metrics. So if your heart rate zones are not set correctly, which you don't know, unless you actually go to a lab, then it's going to be giving you really weird values in terms of all of this stuff. The other thing is, if it's looking at pace, if you're doing runs in the treadmill, it's so hard for the watch to even sync to the treadmill in general. So it may think that you're running slower than you are and so that's not going to look good to this watch metric that's telling you if you're fat productive or not. So there's just too many things that are impacting those things. There's no way for the watch to really be able to tell you those things in a way that's going to be productive to you and not be stressing you out more than anything. The other thing is, I think it also does use the Vo two max metric, which again, I've done mine too, and they literally have a mask, which Vo two max is actually looking at your oxygen consumption. Your watch has no way to know how much oxygen you are consuming, absolutely no way to actually measure that. So really, what the Vo Two max, I think, kind of needs a different name. I feel like it's more of like a performance. It's just measuring your performance is what your watch is trying to do, but it's not measuring your Vo Two max. So I think that's important to recognize because that's what's partially taking into your race predictor is what your Vo Two max is showing that some of what's impacting your overreaching, peaking, all that stuff, recovery times, all this stuff is so impacted by this one metric that couldn't possibly be accurate with just a watch. So take it with a grain of salt is what I would say. If you're feeling like you're overreaching and your watch is saying you're overreaching, maybe there is some truth in that. But if you're not feeling like you're overreaching and you're feeling pretty good and you're sleeping well and you're not having lasting soreness and all this stuff, ignore it. Or maybe try to change your heart rate stuff in there so you're not at least getting bombarded with incorrect information.

Michael Hammond [00:47:12]: No doubt. No doubt. By the way, I think that the newer garmins will do like they do a metric they call performance condition, which kind of changes based on all of the input data and your exercise and activities and stuff. But it still does have Vo two max. They're clearly just not relying on it as much, hopefully because they recognize, like you said, there's no way that a watch is going to get that stuff accurate. And I think that the performance condition stuff, it's like, all right, it can be useful, it can be good, but I prefer to see people's performance condition by their workouts, by their races, things that we can rig, that aren't up to debate, that aren't going to have a software patch six months from now to improve them. Like things that we already know, we already know are good indicators. So Andy and I will conclude here in a minute with just a general some tips on how to use this stuff intelligently after. Now, we've kind of had the discussion, but I do want to give real quick a few usages that we've seen at Runners Connect that I already told the one about the trail running earlier, but just some usages that kind of illustrate how excessive a lot of this stuff gets. So one of them that I see, this one I see all the time. Like I said, everyone who joins New, we've tried to sort of tell people, no, we don't want you doing this. But because people are so reliant on it, what they'll do is we will prescribe strides after a run. If you don't know what strides are, strides are basically like, you'll go do an easy run and then you'll do four by 20 seconds of 90% effort. So you're not sprinting as hard as you possibly can, but you're going a pretty good pace. You do 20 seconds of that, you take maybe a 30 seconds to a minute recovery. You do 20 seconds, you do it again, you do about four of those. It's just a way to kind of work on your running form, do a little bit of like, mini speed work without necessarily doing something hard. They're a tremendous tool. I see people all the time trying to use their GPS on that. And that's a great example of just this absolute X excess technology, because you don't need to know your pace on strides, and even if you did, you're not going to get an accurate reading for such a short rep. Remember, it is measuring you from point A to point B to C to D to E to F. It just keeps on going, but it's not measuring you in absolute real time. Most GPS watches anyway. It's just not measuring you in absolute real time. So strides are a great example of one that I've seen people, our own athletes this used to be a bigger problem a few years ago, but that's definitely a good example of just absolute overuse. Another one is Andy, you brought this up earlier is treadmill running. I will constantly see people connect to the treadmill or use it on, I think, Garmin. They'll have like, a treadmill setting, and athletes will use that instead of the treadmill. And I'm just like, look, maybe the treadmill isn't perfectly calibrated. I understand all that, but at the same time, I'm going to trust the treadmill. The thing that I'm literally running on, the thing that was literally designed, built to read, the exact thing that I'm doing, how fast that belt is moving around it. I'm going to trust that over what? My GPS watch says I'm running on a treadmill. There's just no way. So that's another one. And then really the last one we've already kind of talked about. This is just the recovery stuff where we'll just have people who will do a workout and maybe they'll do a workout on Monday, they'll have another workout set up on Thursday. But they'll say, Garmin says, I need a lot of time before or maybe they'll do a workout on Monday. They'll have an easy run on Tuesday and they'll say, but Garmin says, I need 48 hours to recover. Right, maybe before another really hard effort, but not before doing anything. If we went by the Garmin recovery numbers, you'd run like two or three times a week at most. At most. It wouldn't let you, it wouldn't allow you to run because every time you ran hard, it would just tell you up, you need 48 hours off. That's what it would tell you. So that's just a lot of the usages. But in terms of we'll wrap this up with just how to use this stuff intelligently. Our recommendations based on, again, based on our own personal experiences and based on experiences working with hundreds of athletes, thousands really, who have used GPS, and we've really seen it over the years, come from kind of a balance of a tool and also kind of a nuisance in a way. But we'll tell you how to use it appropriately and intelligently. So one tip that I have is I want you to try to sometimes run by time and also I want you to sometimes run without a watch. A great way to do this is let's say you have like a five mile route that, you know, a five mile route that you've measured it on your GPS before. Again, it's a place where your GPS is going to be more accurate. You know that this route is 5 miles. You know the route really well. That's a great opportunity to if you have a five mile run on your schedule or around that time, like the equivalent time for that amount for that type of run to go do that run, sands watch, go do that run, toss the watch for one run, maybe one easy run a week or something like that. And the thing I always add whenever I tell people to do that because I know, I know what people do. Don't you be looking at that kitchen clock before you leave and then right when you get back, I don't want to see that. I don't want you to know how long this thing takes you. This is an easy run. I know. Andy's shaking her head. I'm telling you, I've seen it done. I've. Seen it happen. I hate to admit I've done it myself. For me, it was more like I would drive somewhere in the car and I would look at the car. I'd be like, no, I don't want to know. I'd cover it with my hand. Don't want to know what time I'm running. I don't want to know how long this takes. So that's a great opportunity though, to force your body to truly run easy and just to run how it wants to run. I really think that on top of that kind of a corollary to that is for easy runs. Number one, there's no real easy pace. We do at Runners Connect, when we give people training plans, we do give them a pace, we give them a range, mostly because we would just have a mutiny if we didn't like, if we just said, go run easy. It's crazy to me how confusing that can be. But I understand people are so reliant on the GPS, they're so reliant on the technology, that it can be difficult to know how to just truly run easy. So there is no proper easy pace. Easy is an effort. Most importantly, before it's a pace, before it's any calculation, it's just an effort. You got to go run easy. Yeah, you can use heart rate or whatever, but really, the other thing is I want you to just learn how to do an easy run properly. And by that, what I mean is most people who use GPS, let's say that their easy pace that either they have determined or coach has determined or whatever is, let's say it's nine minutes a mile. Okay? What they'll do, they will leave the house, start running, and bam, they're running nine minutes a mile. Like they're running nine minutes a mile and then they're running nine minutes a mile on mile three and nine minutes a mile on mile five. That's not really the best way to do an easy run because the problem is that you're almost always going to be forcing that pace early on. I gave the example of the Kenyans earlier. I love using the Kenyan examples because these journalists and these guys that will go and report on them, they will go to these camps and you will have guys who are running like a bunch of sub 210 marathoners. We're talking about absolute ridiculously fast guys who can run well under five minutes a mile for a marathon. And they'll go out on their easy run and the first mile will be like ten minutes. These guys will absolutely slog the first 10 miles, but it might be a ten mile run. That last mile might be like 530. That's how they do it though, because that is easy for them. But they're warming up. They're taking it easy. They're letting their body warm up into the run. Instead of necessarily immediately going out and just forcing a pace right away, they're letting themselves warm up into the run. I love it. Runners connect. A lot of our athletes have learned this over time. I love seeing people with, like, progressive splits on their easy runs. If their pace range is like nine minutes to 940. I love seeing people who their first miles, like 1020. That's great. And then they go 1010, flat 945, end with a 920, or even end with a little bit under nine. And they say, oops, I went a little quick on that last one. I doubt it. I bet you were fine. I bet you were just nice and warmed up, felt good today. And you let the run progress instead of forcing that pace early on. So that's something I really like to see. And I think that that's one of the best ways that you can not use GPS is to really learn how to run easy. Andy, what do you have to add in terms of tips for people to use this stuff intelligently?

Andie Cozzarelli [00:56:05]: Right? I mean, I think the biggest thing I always say is the balance of it, right? Always having a balance of how much you rely and consume the data that it's giving you, even down to the pacing that you're doing. Have balance on how often you're looking at your watch. Have balance on how often you're relying on the GPS to control your workouts. Define places you can do workouts where you know the distance. Even if you can map it out on a run and you can figure out what generally a distance is for, something you can do repeats around that spot, then great. That's going to be a good way to not let the GPS be the only factor that you're thinking about your effort on. Take your own splits, do stuff like that. That's going to be a really good way for you to keep balancing out how much you're relying on the GPS entirely and how much you're allowing your body to just focus on the effort. Because I think that understanding effort is such a huge piece of training. So beyond the paces you're running, I think effort is more important. Honestly, that's what dictates how fast you're going to be able to run in a race. As much as it would be great if we could just run paces that we wanted to run in order to achieve a race time, it has to be based on what the effort is for your body. So even in figuring out what paces we should be running, it's the effort that's guiding that. So be open to that being more important than what your GPS watch is telling you. All this stuff is going to be so huge in just helping you to get faster and then even balance in how much you're using the watch for recovery and understanding what that recovery means. We talked about the heart rate balance and how often you're looking at that balance and how much you're just like going through and mulling through that data, knowing what helps you with it and what you can just be like, let me set that aside. So those are my biggest tips, I would say. I think you covered a lot of good stuff there, Michael, in terms of easy runs and maybe not running with a watch every so often. You can also use your GPS watch and just change the watch face so it just tells you how long you've been running. And that could be an easy way to also ignore anything else. You don't know what your pace is. Maybe you just have the time on there so you know how long you've been running for. Stuff like that I think would be really valuable for, especially if you're in a space where you're feeling like you're just consumed with your watch. If you've already gotten this down pat, great, keep doing what you're doing. But if you're feeling like you're over consumed with the data or what your watch is telling you, go ahead and try some of these tactics. I think it'll just help you to take some stress off. I think the biggest thing that helped me was to recognize how little these little metric pieces impacted my performance. And it came down to me just not using my watch for a period of time. And I ran my fastest races and now that experience was what allowed me to change how I was behaving with my training because I realized how little that mattered. I was running easy, I was listening to my body and it all paid off and I didn't need to be running seven minute pace all day. So be open to letting your body tell you that. That's what I would say.

Michael Hammond [00:59:17]: Yeah, I think that Andy was talking about like if you don't think this is a problem for you, then maybe it doesn't apply. What I would challenge everyone to do is to go one week without your GPS watch. No running with it, no wearing it at night, no wearing it during the day, and see how you handle it. If nothing changes in your life and nothing changes in your training and everything's great, then yeah, you probably don't have this is kind of like an addiction. This is like drugs or alcohol or something like that. Go a week without it and then you'll see if you actually have a problem. Maybe it's such an addiction that you can't know that you're in it. You can't know you're in it unless you go without it. So give it a week, try to go without it. I know it's frustrating in a lot of ways, but I do think that it's something that's worthwhile to give it some time. At least that way you can kind of take a step back and really analyze, am I so dependent on this thing that it's become a problem or am I actually using it as a proper training tool. So I think those are some really good tips. GPS is a big topic. I think ultimately, just to kind of round up what we talked about is like, you got to learn how to listen to your body. You got to learn how to be more in tune with yourself and also just to be more I heard a quote, it's kind of a goofy quote a little bit, but I still really like it to this day. I heard this a long time ago. I think it's from a movie. It's don't think kung fu, feel kung fu. And I really like that because I think that really applies to running. Don't think running, feel running. And that's a very difficult thing to do. Most runners nowadays, those of you out there listening, I don't see this very often. I really don't see people who have this ability. And I'll tell you what, when people do develop the ability, the benefits are tremendous. I just see a lot more relaxed training. I see easier easy runs, more appropriate easy runs. I see rest when rest needs to be taken, the same type of person who's likely to be overwhelmed with all this data and let it affect them mentally. That's the same type of person that if there's a workout on the schedule, but they feel like absolute death, they haven't fueled properly, their sleep has been terrible for the last like, four nights, et cetera, et cetera, they're still going to hammer through the workout. That's exactly the same type of person who's not going to recognize, hey, this is the time to bag this. This is the time to throw this workout out the window, get my body back under me and recover. Whereas the person who's more in tune with themselves and less reliant on all the technology, that's the person who's going to recognize, hey, you know what? This ain't the day. I'm not going to win the battle and sacrifice the war. I'm going to take this day off. I'm going to move forward. So really, I think that ultimately, Andy and I are very much even if there were little things that we didn't agree on, we're very much in agreement that you got to learn how to listen your body. Don't be over relying on this stuff and at minimum, have, like, a day, a week where you just don't rely so much on the thing. So anyway, guys, thank you so much for everybody for listening. If you have any further questions on this, we'd be happy to talk about it more, but I think we'll be on to a next topic when we go forward. GPS has been kind of beat to death with us because it's just such a big topic within the running world and certainly within our, within our own community. But anyway, thank you guys so much for listening. We really appreciate it. And we'll see you next time. Take care everybody.

Finn Melanson [01:02:57]: Thanks for listening to the Run to the Top podcast. I'm your host, Finn Mulanson. As always, our mission here is to help you become a better runner with every episode. Please consider connecting with me on Instagram at Wasatch, Finn, and the rest of our team at Runners Connect. Also consider supporting our show for free with a rating on the Spotify and Apple Podcast players. And lastly, if you love the show and want bonus content, behind the scenes experiences with our guests and premier access to contests and giveaways and subscribe to our newsletter by going to RunnersConnect. Net podcast. Until next time, happy trading.