Current pace all wrong: possible cause

I guess cadence is used in some way to enhance the measurement or just to reduce the time that the watch takes to notice any change in pace.
That said, I don't think that cadence is the point here. I still believe it's all about orientation. I also remember reading that cyclists feel more satisfied with the F5. Who wrote this was assuming that the pace calculation worked better on higher speeds, but now it seems clear that also in this case orientation was the key, as cyclists often tie the watch to the handlebar.

No lemmings here to test my delusional theories?

pistapoci I agree with you in principle, but just wanna clarify that wrist accel gives you more than cadence. Just as the footpod, it measures your 3d motion in order to estimate speed. As a counter example, the HRM-RUN and RD-POD provide cadence, but not speed. (Because they're not placed on an appropriate part of the body.)

I only bring it up because many people assume that the footpod (and wrist accel) just "count steps", which is then multiplied by some sort of fixed stride length, which is possibly modified by the calibration factor. You can see this is not the case by running on a treadmill (with footpod or just wrist accel), and changing speed without changing cadence. In my experience, both the footpod and wrist accel will react to the speed change (although the footpod works a lot better.)

Anyway congrats on figuring that out. In a perfect world, you could contact DCR about this and he could blow the whole "Fenix 5 pace conspiracy" wide open! :D.

In reality, he's always trolling runners for caring too much about GPS pace accuracy, and he usually claims not to see some of the issues that many runners do. I'm not saying he's being untruthful, but he just doesn't seem to see what others do, probably because there's no way he can personally test watches in the same way that thousands of runners collectively do.

WillNorthYork I'm not that fixated on current pace, but this F?nix situation is slightly a bigger deal. I'm thinking about going back to use my m400 for the runs where I want a little bit of precision and keep the F5 for all the other sports that I do.

It would be awesome though if
dcrainmaker would take some time to test if my post #8 ( https://forums.garmin.com/forum/on-t...85#post1452085 ) checks out. It would be worth an article :D

I’m thinking about going back to use my m400 for the runs where I want a little bit of precision and keep the F5 for all the other sports that I do.

If you want precision and accuracy of pace, get a foot pod - period. Stryd is the Platinum standard, but expensive; the standard Garmin SDM4 foot pod is much cheaper and good enough for most people (once calibrated) and is certainly better than any GPS watch on the market (check out fellrnr.com for more detail on comparative trail runs done with foot pods vs GPS watches)

I know foot pods are much more effective in comparison of the GPS watch alone, but as I'm not a data freak, I just want it to be usable and not all messed up. For normal runs I'll stick with the F5. I don't train hard nor race since my knee caps went on laziness strike, but if I need a bit of precision I'm satisfied with my former watch, so I think I'll bring it back from the old tech drawer.
That said, I really hope there could be a way to make the F5 more reliable, not only in terms of instant pace, but total distance too.

mcbadger https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxUPetG3JMI

Very useful video. Ray, have you an idea of how this compares to earlier Fenix watches (I have the original Fenix 3 Sapphire version)? Debating whether to update to the 5.

From my recent experiences I think orientation of the arm is key for GPS - on Sunday I went for a very leisurely walk in the countryside - much of it open ground with few trees. I recorded this as a walk activity. I was not looking for pace but for a reasonable GPS track. The GPS track was poor - much worse than a typical track when I run in the same area. I believe this is probably due to wrist position - as I say this was a very lesisurely walk so not a great amount of arm swing so the watch was mostly not raised up angled to the sky unlike a running arm action where the watch arm is brought up frequently. Additionally despite being resonably tight on my wrist the HR readings were all over the place and somehow gace me a 1.9 Aerobic and 1,1 anaerobic benefit. The 1.1 is particularly strange - I've done lots of hard runs where I get 0 anaerobic benefit.

Several months ago I conduct experiments regarding watch orientation. The experimentations revealed that during bike ride the path was very good but when running on the same places the path is all over the place (experiments in the city)
??????My natural conclusion was that the difference was watch orientation since im the bike rides the watch is facing up.

Also noticed that if the watch face was facing a building the path was much worse.