Posted by Amy | Posted in Mind Games, Running, Uncategorized | Posted on 25-08-2010
Tags: 3 miles, Nike+, Running
Man, oh man, there is a raging fire tornado in Nike+’s pants right now. I trot off for my lovely little 3mile jaunt around the neighborhood (I can neither confirm nor deny that there was some air guitar action for Glee’s Total Eclipse of the Heart). I know this is three miles. How do I know? OK, I’m a dork so I mapped it out on Nike+’s MapIt feature and yes, I drove it in my car. 0I’m about a half mile from home when the show tunes end and some groovy mellow tunes come on and I check my Nike+ in my iPod. The lovely man’s voice tells me I’ve run 3.3 miles at a pace of 10 minutes and 23 seconds.
Are you insane??
First of all, a worm hole didn’t just open up and add an extra half mile onto my run. I am certainly not cool enough to have an Einstein theory proved on my running course. Second, I do not run that fast.
I re-calibrated my Nike+ yesterday because it was add about an extra quarter mile to my runs. That’s not so bad, but an extra half mile is a wee bit out of control. I’m going to have to do some research on what’s up with that. Any Nike+ users out there wanna clue me in, I’d love the support!
My fibbing Nike+ says I ran 3.77 miles in 41:09 at a pace of 10’54″ burning 527 calories.
Had the same problem, and then also the inverted problem where I knew it was counting too slow. Being the engineer that I am, I did a bunch of measuring, calibrating, testing and finally internet-reading.
My theory is that it’s reasonably accurate when you run close to the pace you calibrated it at on flat surfaces. But only then.
Hills make it seriously overcount (as a fraction of the distance run), even when they’re pretty small, since your stride length shortens on hills. Even when you run a loop on hills, the average comes out to be too long because the number of steps you take at the shorter stride going uphill is larger than the number of longer strides you take going downhill.
I can calibrate the damn thing on the track and then test it right after, and it’s right on the money. So I figure the only way a device that counts step lengths and stride ‘hardness’ can miscount on flat surfaces when it was calibrated on one and is confirmed to be accurate under those conditions is that I just don’t run as uniformly as I would need to for it to be accurate. The device may be performing to claimed specification, but it just doesn’t work for me.
I thought I was running a good mile or two longer than I think I actually was for a good six months. It was infuriating to find out I had actually never run seven miles, my iPod was just lying to me.
I discovered the problem when the battery was running out in the footpod. I got notifications like “Your pace is zero minutes a mile” when I pressed the center button. Yeah, that’s definitely code for “I have a detection problem somewhere”. Buying a new footpod fixed that behavior. Sadly, not the accuracy problem.
This is why I have my heart set on a Garmin. For now, I’m just running on pre-measured trails, because I am NOT training for a half marathon with flaky distance measurements!