What is prompting me to write this post is that last night I did a run (http://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/905308294) for which at one point I stopped to send a text message to my husband. As it can be clearly seen on my activity data, I was stopped for about 6:15 (six minutes, 15 seconds) (that can be seen by looking at the pace chart). When I began running again, I pressed the Start/Stop button on my watch to start it up again, only to find to my dismay that it said "Run Stopped" on the screen (in other words, either it had failed to stop when I pressed Stop when I stopped earlier, or I had failed to press Stop when I stopped). So I pressed Start/Stop again and it started. I was very frustrated to see that my overall pace had dropped by over 40 seconds per mile (it was a pace workout. I really needed to see that average pace throughout the run), because it had included the 6+ minutes I was stopped in my overall pace.
There are a couple different issues here:
1) My watch is set to auto-pause when I go slower than 25:00/mile pace. This workout I was doing last night was an Advanced workout. I have had my watch for over six years and am very familiar with it. I am aware that when an Advanced workout is going, the watch ignores the command to auto-pause when going slower than 25:00/mile pace. So normally when I do need to stop, I am good about making sure I press the Start/Stop button. However, obviously it does not work out every time (either I forget, or it doesn't register when I press it, and I neglect to notice that it doesn't stop), and something like this happens. So the issue here is that I should not have to press Stop when I stop. The watch settings are to auto-pause when I'm going slower than 25:00/mile pace, so why does that feature not work doing Advanced workouts!? This is frustrating, very frustrating.
2) When things like the above occur, users should have more control over their activity data, to be able to edit-out errors like this. It would take care of the whole problem if I could click Edit, look at the section of the run I want to cut-out, click and drag over that section, and select an option like "Delete this section of the activity", and then also to be able to save it in a way to where it edits the original TCX file as well. Another way to make this possible would be for the workout to auto-detect sections like this, and to pop up with something that says something like, "It appears that you were stopped for a significant amount of time when your watch was accidentally left running. Would you like to review this section and determine whether to keep or remove that section of your activity?" The user could click Yes, then upon viewing the section in-question, click Keep or Delete.
Please note how Strava handles this exact issue. Without me doing any editing at all, Strava determined that there was a section where I was actually stopped although the watch was left accidentally running. It automatically removed that section of "bad" data. http://www.strava.com/activities/396834188