How did runners measure distance before GPS watches

I was referring to road running 10k to Marathon and longer.
I don't know much about track.

Back in high school our coach had a bunch of runs mapped out. Mostly he used an odometer on his bike because that gave the most accurate result. Occasionally, he’d measure new routes with his car if he didn’t have a chance to measure with his bike.

We’d usually do repeats on grass routes he measured with a wheel.

If we were curious we’d drive or bike a route afterwards to get an estimate. Usually if we took a wrong turn or something.

Everyone just ran Badger Miles.

odometer and pacing. plus map.

the measurements were crazy accurate. in our hood. i guess half a dozen people would compare notes. going back to the day of horse and buggy.

that said, a one off measurment from back in the day of a marathon course. by"officials" from the jackasss olympic committees, i would not trust far as i could throw them.

M65 here, started running in 1975. Multiple car odometers. My ’65 Mustang always had a different distance on the same course as our family’s Chevy Impala. So, I averaged the two. Since I am a stick-in-the-mud and I live in the same area running the same roads (although painfully SO much slower), those same course average measurements have held up as accurate, using a GPS and online measuring sites such as gmap-pedometer.com.

Steel tape

Car.

We just measured routes in the car. Marked mile markers on posts, trees, the road. After a while you sort of just knew where all the mile markers were! Wheel for shorter stuff like it is used now! If we did not run on a marked course, we just guestimated our distance based on our effort. Like 70:00 easy was about 10. Who knows how accurate all of those 70 mile weeks were haha!

Odometer on bike or car for anything on the roads or sidewalks. A meter wheel for anything cross country. Once internet was prevalent, the good 'ole gmap-pedometer.com was the go to tool. I would run by feel/time, and then I would come home and map it and see if I had a good run or not. Of course, the accuracy of the online mapping wasn't that great. We had a cross country meet where they tried to do this, and the course ended up significantly short.

To be honest, doing easy runs by feel/time probably prevented overtraining! On Thursday afternoons before a Saturday morning cross country meet, we were prescribed an "easy 6 miles." Of course, my legs were feeling like garbage after our schedule of Monday long run, Tuesday 800s, and Wednesday 3 mile tempo + 200s. We would end up just going jogging suuuuuuuuuuper easy in the woods for 40 minutes for our "easy 6." In reality, we were probably 9:00 pace recovery day and would have been lucky to go 4.5.

Whether racing or doing a workout or easy run, I always had a very good sense of my pace. If my coach told me to run 4:50 mile repeats on a flat section of a course or trail he had wheeled off (he was really into that and would measure full cross country courses as part of a big project he undertook), I would never be more than 5 seconds off, usually within like 2-3. I even used to test myself running laps at different target paces and checking my time at the end of the lap, especially with progression runs. 2 laps @ 100 seconds, 2 laps @ 95 seconds, etc. Obviously things like hills could add in some uncertainty, but it was good enough for government work. And I’d run a lot of the same routes repeatedly. I also know that at my easy pace it was about 205 breath cycles per mile (three steps breathing in, three steps breathing out) and I would often count as it’s not like I had much else to do while I ran.

In Indiana, county roads were a mile apart, so if you wanted to run four miles, you ran out to the next road, turned right, went to the next one, turned right, and did this again until you got to the starting point. Six miles meant two roads before turning, then one road, then two and then one. Eight miles was out two, right two, right two and right two more.

Car odometers have been a thing for quite a while. Maybe my 10 mile route was actually 10.1 or 9.9 but that's really not going to change much.

I had my mom drive a route from my house and we marked off every mile up to 6 miles and noted the landmarks. I still run this route wjen I visit them and they were pretty close to what my gps says today.

I also liked to run the local 10k road race course and knew the location of the official mile markers.

I knew the relative distance (from car odometer) to major landmarks from my house like the school, my friends houses, and work etc.

Finally, did a lot of workouts at the high school track

Until 2000, I didn’t use a GPS watch. When I finally got one, I was off by 0.1 mile or less per mile on known routes, and usually on the long side. A good sense of pace helps. Probably will lose that skill eventually, as a matter of cognitive technology.

There were (and still are) websites where you can click on the map and it'll count up the miles for you and identify mile/km marks. Use this before or after your run and you're good to go without GPS.

We would fist measure the length of our feet, then walk the course placing our feet end to end. We would then tally the number of feet and multiply that number by the length of each foot. Next, convert the total to miles or kilometers depending on preference. Once the distance was known we would run the route.