Average pace calculation on GARMIN CONNECT

Yes, activity and lap distances are rounded for display in Connect and your watch. You can kind of guess that from looking at your data. Other than rounding, the other 2 explanations for those lap distances are:

- you ran *exactly* 50 or 60 metres for each of those laps

or

- Garmin internally measures distance only the nearest 10 m

Both of those things seem pretty unlikely, without knowing anything else.

You can see the original recorded distances to the nearest meter (or better) as follows:

- open activity on the Connect website 

- select gear icon (upper right) and click Export File. This will download the original FIT file in a ZIP

- open fitfileviewer.com and open the file you exported

I’m pretty confident that lap pace and average activity pace are calculated from lap/activity time and distance, as you suggested.

Thanks, I opened the .fit file with fitfileviewer.com, and I get the below result. I am not able to find the average pace. Could you tell me where this data is located? Thanks

Thanks, I read somewhere that it's not possible to set 50 meters run, just 400m as standard. Is this true? Thanks!

5858725 said:

it's not possible to set 50 meters run, just 400m as standard. Is this true?

I do not quite understand what you exactly mean by "set 50 meters run". If you mean to record a run that is 50m long, then you can certainly do it. You can even record just a 1m long run (though it will be rather challenging  ). If you mean changing the track length at the Track Run activity, then it can be indeed only 400m. However, you can still change the auto-lap length to a short distance. The exact minimal distance may differ from model to model, but in my case (Instinct 3), the minimal auto-lap distance is 20m. And, of course, you can set manual laps for as short distances as you want.

Yes I meant changing the track length to a different value than 400m. By the way, on my FR255 it does not allow to set minimal autolap distance to less than 200m. 

TL;DR the original recorded activity data has activity and lap distances to the nearest 0.01 m.

You are correct that the lap pace you see in Connect is based on a more precise distance than what's normally shown. (What's normally shown is distance to the nearest 0.01 km = 10 m).

But if your activity type is Track Running, Connect *should* show lap distances to the nearest metre. The website will show activity distance to the nearest metre, but the app will show 2 decimals (for some reason).

5858725 said:

I am not able to find the average pace. Could you tell me where this data is located? Thanks

I was actually suggesting using fitfileviewer to determine the exact recorded *distance* for each lap, to see that they're not exactly 50-60 metres, as per your original question.

It might be much easier to simply change the type of the activity to Track Running in Connect, which should change the display so that you see distances to the nearest metre.

Click on the activity type in the top-left corner:

But it does sound like you're already using track run mode? If so, it's strange that it's not showing distances in metres for you.

Here's an example where I changed a (somewhat) steady state run with some strides at the end to Track Running:

You can see that:

- distances are displayed in metres

- The data for the 1st stride is displayed as 94 m, 19.2 seconds, with an average pace of 3:24.

19.2 s / 0.094 km = ~204.255 s / km = ~3:24 min:secs / km

The average pace indeed roughly matches the more precise distance of 94 m.

If I switch back to Running, the distance will be shown as 0.09 km, which ofc would not produce an average pace of 3:24.

19.2 / 0.09 km = ~213.33 = 3:33 min:secs / km

If look in fitfileviewer, I can see that the lap distance was actually recorded with an even greater precision: 94.29m

I can also see that while there are columns (field definitions) for session/lap average speed and session/lap max speed, these are not populated for my device (FR955). This is because Connect typically calculates average speed/pace and max speed/pace for a lap/activity from the data (based on the recorded time and distance). (If you edit your activity distance, you will see the average pace change.)

Speaking of the Session table (which has activity summary data), you can also see that your run distance is recorded there, to the nearest 0.01 metre:

Thanks, now is clear... BTW, still one point regarding the Track Running feature: the handbook of FR255 states "make sure you are on a 400 meters ride" while using Track Running and I misunderstood I that I could only use for that distance (!). As far as I understand now, I can use the Track Running feature also for a standard run of 10 kms or whatever kms, if I want to have more precision on the distance and time.

So, if that is the case, I wonder why Garmin did not allow the more precision in every case (i.e. standard running) by default.

Thanks!