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Choose between avg. moving pace and avg. pace

On most of my runs I have to cross some kind of road and therefore pause the timer of the watch. It is nice that Garmin displays both the elapsed time and the moving time, and consequently the avg pace and avg moving pace.
But what I find really annoying is that if you compare the pace of your runs, you always see the in my opinion unimportant avg pace and elapsed time. I only care what my actual moving pace is. Sometimes I have to wait for several cars before I can pass the road and therefore the elapsed time and avg pace varies a lot.
Therefore it would be really helpful to select the avg moving pace as the default pace, so that you can always directly see any improvement in your runs. Otherwise you would have to open every run and check the avg moving pace buried in the website or garmin app.

I am sure other people have the same concern.

Edit: I am using Auto Pause currently, but stop the watch timer manually when I am not running. Would it help in my case to disable auto pause?
  • Are you talking about on Garmin Connect, or on the watch?

    Garmin Connect calculates moving time and displays an average moving pace. I think this is independent of the Timer.

    As far as I'm aware, you can only display Average Pace on the watch. Average Pace is Timer / Elapsed Distance. What that actually measures depends on whether you stop the timer or not (manually or with Auto Pause).
    If you stop the timer when you stop running, then Average Pace is equal to your average moving pace, but then you can't see your true overall average pace (Elapsed Time / Elapsed Distance) on the watch.
    If you don't do that, then Timer is equal to Elapsed Time, and so Average Pace includes your stoppage time (Elapsed Time / Elapsed Distance), but then you can't see your average moving pace on the watch.

    I usually leave the timer running the whole time. I experimented with a moving average pace data field in Connect IQ (by counting what portion of the Timer time was below a certain speed), and it works quite well.
  • You are right, the watch does not show avg moving pace.
    The problem is that I currently manually stop the timer when I stop running, so in this case the timer should equal the moving time, right?
    If you take a look at my activity from yesterday https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/1369405548, there is a difference of 51 seconds. I don't understand why, I will try to play a bit with auto pause settings. Maybe that will help...
    As far as I remember my old 305 did not have these annoyances
  • The algorithm Garmin Connect uses to calculate moving pace is (as far as I'm aware) unknown, but the threshold of what is and what is not 'moving' is probably the cause here. You could, as you say, experiment with adjusting your Auto Pause settings, or you could change to manually stopping and starting the timer. The latter option is probably better, as you are likely to have a better estimate of whether you are running or not, versus Garmin's algorithms.
  • Yes, but this is the problem.
    This is what I am currently doing. I am manually stopping the watch when I am not running. But I noticed that auto pause was still on in my running profile. I turned it off and will check on the next run.
    Thanks for help btw
  • So I did another run today with auto pause turned off this time.
    The result is unfortunately still the same. If auto pause is turned off I would imagine the moving time and the "time" should be identical, even if I stopp the watch when crossing a road. In the activity from today the timer is at 55:38 and the moving time at 55:02. https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/1370931662
    Furthermore you can see that the wrist heart rate is off for the first 6 minutes, the same happened yesterday...GPS seems to be a bit inaccurate, too.
  • I think I found something interesting regarding my problem described above. It seems that the watch is only truly stopping the time (by that I mean the timer value equals the moving timer value) if it is stopped for a specific amount of time.
    So if you make a quick stop before crossing the road, which could be only a few seconds, the watch therefore seems to ignore the time difference for the calculation of the timer value. Only if the watch is stopped for 20 seconds or higher (not sure about the exact value here) the moving time and therefore the moving avg pace equals the timer and avg pace.
    I keep testing this behavior, maybe this information helps somebody.