Last 2min/500m Averaged Pace

Former Member over 10 years ago

Hello

I was wondering if it would be possible to make a data field that displays your average pace for the last few minutes (or say the last 500m). The idea would be to have something simular to what lap pace does now, but without the sometimes quite serious (and distracting) fluctuations at the beginning of a new lap (be it because of an altitude change, or a bad gps point). After 4-500m lap pace seems extremely solid so I was thinking this might be something to use.
Instant pace works quite well, but for flat longer distance races I would prefer something a little smoother (the last third of a Marathon my brain seems to cut the connection to the parts where common sense resides).

If someone else thinks this would be useful and doable I would be very happy to see something like this among the apps. Than you for reading :-)

Former Member over 10 years ago

Working on it right now :)
Edit: Work done, just doing some more testing before submitting. Is an average over the last two minutes OK? In the future the API will hopefully make it possible to use user configurable settings, but for the time being I need to set a number.

-Torstein

Former Member over 10 years ago

Datafield now live in the App Store:
https://apps.garmin.com/en-US/apps/9b3ffe65-a8e5-4f4b-9699-bdfc087292c1

Former Member over 10 years ago

Fantastic - thank you soooo much!
I will try it out on my next run (hopefully tomorrow), but it is looking very good so far!

Former Member over 10 years ago

Got to try the Data Field this morning (920 xt), and as it stands now it will propably be my main data field for upcoming races, and long steady runs. Thank you so very much for taking your time to make this!

Two things (one propably easy, one mayby not so easy) would make it even better (I think):

1. Adding a zero before single-digit seconds would improve readability (this might be personal, but that seems to be how Garmin do their own data fields). Since my easy runs are around 5min/km and my hard ones are around 4 I would notice this quite a lot. **I just saw that the screenshot shows this being the case with both minutes and seconds, if it would be possible to do it with just the seconds I think that might be the best solution**

2. This might be tricky, but would make the data field even better I think - Only using data from when the timer is running. As it is now the first minutes of the run are obviously not showing anything useful. This is not much of an issue of course (pacing the first 2 min of a run is hardly difficult:-), but later in the run if you have to stop (for whatever reason - red lights, red tights, pretty sights, dog bites) it for obvious reasons takes a bit of time for the field to make sense again.

Two minutes seemed to work quite well, although the option to choose this in the future would of course be very welcome (I imagine the optimal interval is dependant on your running pace and mayby how well the gps tracks on your route).

**edited**

Former Member over 10 years ago

Glad you like the data field :)

Regarding your suggestions:
1. You mean showing only leading zero for the second value, for instance 5:04 and not 05:04? That should be easy enough to do. I won't be at my development computer until monday, but I'll see if I can fix it then.

2. I'll look into it, should be possible to do something about it. I already filter out 0 pace values. One little problem is that my own watch hasn't arrived yet, so it is a bit difficult to test things like that at the moment.

-Torstein

Former Member over 10 years ago

1. That would be perfect, but what happens right now is in fact 5:4 (or 13:6 in the case of a double-digit minute) (instead of 05:04 or 5:04). The minutes can be with or without the leading zero, but it looks a little strange when the seconds don't have it.

Amazing that you are prepared to do this work before you have your own hardware - and that it allready works as well as it does! Thank you so much for your work.

Former Member over 10 years ago

Strange.. It looks OK in the simulator. Anyway, I'll look into it :)
What watch are you using?

-Torstein

Former Member over 10 years ago

920xt.

Former Member over 10 years ago

The %.2d format specifier does not work properly on ConnectIQ devices. For integer numbers, please use %02d instead.

Former Member over 10 years ago

Leading zero is now removed form the minute field, and added as necessary to the second field. As Brian suggests, I had used the %.2d format specifier and not the %02d.

I have also tried to only use values from when the timer is running, but consider that feature 'beta' for now.
It is difficult to test properly without hardware :)

EDIT: Tweaked the averaging algorithm a bit, and did a series of simulations. Seems pretty good now. Please test :)