How does Garmin calculates record time?

VladimirGabitov

Please see Why Am I Getting a "New PR" Message After Each Recorded Activity?. You most likely just need to accept a PR activity.

Garmin-Sierra, My question is - why Garmin offers PR time 41:13 instead of 40:54?

Did you "Accept" 40:54? Follow the steps from How Do I Manage My Personal Records in Garmin Connect?. You may need to manually assign the personal record if you don't see the option to accept 40:54 anymore.

No. It was one activity.

1. I run 10.09km in 41:13 min, but time for first 10km was 40:54.

2. After that Garmin offered me to confirm new PR 41:13, it was accepted. There was no offer for 40:54.

3. I tried to do it manually, but unsuccessful, still offers 41:13.

4. Then I tried some trick, and offered to set it as 5K record, and it offers not the best 5K from this run, but still 41:13. Seems something wrong again with Garmin IT.

This is old and arguably unintuitive behavior, but I think it's working as intended. What Garmin does for PRs is if you run slightly longer than a given PR distance (like 10k), it uses your full activity time. If you run a lot longer than the PR distance, it uses the time for that distance (or at least maybe it did in the past).

I think the reason for this behavior is so that race PRs are recorded as expected. e.g. If you run a 10k race, it's very rare (or impossible) that your watch will record exactly 10k or that you'll even run exactly 10k. Usually the recorded distance will be slightly higher (e.g. 10.2 k). In this case, it makes sense to use the whole activity time for the PR time, and not just the time for the fastest 10k segment.

Contrast with Strava which always uses the fastest X km segment of an activity for X km "estimated best effort" time. In Strava, all my estimated best effort times corresponding to race distances are slightly shorter than my real PR times.

It would probably help if there was a support article for this (maybe there is?) or even better, an explanation in the Connect UI itself.

You can manually edit your PRs in the Connect app or website. From there, I think you can also sync them back to your device.

First this logic is very strange, at least you can give users choose which approach they prefer...  

There is no such option like edit record. Do you mean change distance/time off activity used as record?

Just click into your "Record" time and adjust the numbers, then select the green checkmark.

VladimirGabitov said:

First this logic is very strange, at least you can give users choose which approach they prefer...  

I agree it's not intuitive but it makes sense from the POV of racing.

Whether you're a hobby jogger or an elite, your official times / PRs are determined by the distance of the race you ran, not the actual distance you ran or the distance recorded by the watch. If you run / record 42.8 km for a marathon (officially 42.2 km), your BQ time will come from the entire race time, not the fastest 42.2 km recorded by your watch.

What Garmin is doing is basically replicating "race PR" logic: if you run 10.2 km, Garmin assumes you ran a 10 km race.

In the past, if you ran a lot longer than 10k (say 13k), you could get a PR for the fastest 10k segment in that activity. I'm not sure if that's still the case today. It's definitely the case for "fastest X distance" on the watch itself, but I don't know if that translates to a PR in Connect.

Like I said, strava's "estimated best efforts" are calculated in the straightforward way you'd expect, but for me, the ones associated with race distances are all wrong (slightly too fast).