The title says it all: I don't need elevation, splits, a training plan, calories burned, a map, syncing to my Android phone, or any of that.
I just want a simple watch that will display accurate instantaneous pace (and total distance) in large digits, with a minimum of extraneous distraction and hassle.
Your suggestions?
My suggestion: abandon any hope of accurate instantaneous pace. Think about it. Pace is distance divided by time, so you always have to measure pace over some amount of time, not instantaneously. You could make that amount of time very short, like a second or less, but if you do, your "instantaneous pace" will be very volatile and jump around a lot because GPS watches measure time with insane accuracy (I don't know, millionths of a second, look at a GPX file), but their measure of location (and therefore distance) is an estimate and subject to a lot of error.
So it's much more useful to look for reasonably accurate GPS (which most decent watches have now) and use some kind of lap pace rather than instantaneous pace. Then you just keep an eye on your lap pace and see if it's going up or down. The Garmin 2XX line has 1-second accuracy in lap pace, while the 45/55/etc. line only has 5-second accuracy, my one complaint about the 45/55 line.
colder and wiser wrote:
My suggestion: abandon any hope of accurate instantaneous pace. Think about it. Pace is distance divided by time, so you always have to measure pace over some amount of time, not instantaneously. You could make that amount of time very short, like a second or less, but if you do, your "instantaneous pace" will be very volatile and jump around a lot because GPS watches measure time with insane accuracy (I don't know, millionths of a second, look at a GPX file), but their measure of location (and therefore distance) is an estimate and subject to a lot of error.
So it's much more useful to look for reasonably accurate GPS (which most decent watches have now) and use some kind of lap pace rather than instantaneous pace. Then you just keep an eye on your lap pace and see if it's going up or down. The Garmin 2XX line has 1-second accuracy in lap pace, while the 45/55/etc. line only has 5-second accuracy, my one complaint about the 45/55 line.
Yes, the best we can have is a Plank watch that can measure the position and momentum product to within half the Plank constant at every point in time.
If only our workouts weren’t bottlenecked by Heisenberg.
Why do you want "instantaneous" pace? What benefit does that have over 5 or 10 second rolling average pace? It would be too volatile without any averaging
edit: I think you really mean you just want an accurate pace. In that case something like 255/265/955/965 have proven very accurate.
You might be best served by basically any watch plus a Stryd foodpod.
colder and wiser wrote:
My suggestion: abandon any hope of accurate instantaneous pace. Think about it. Pace is distance divided by time, so you always have to measure pace over some amount of time, not instantaneously. You could make that amount of time very short, like a second or less, but if you do, your "instantaneous pace" will be very volatile and jump around a lot because GPS watches measure time with insane accuracy (I don't know, millionths of a second, look at a GPX file), but their measure of location (and therefore distance) is an estimate and subject to a lot of error.
So it's much more useful to look for reasonably accurate GPS (which most decent watches have now) and use some kind of lap pace rather than instantaneous pace. Then you just keep an eye on your lap pace and see if it's going up or down. The Garmin 2XX line has 1-second accuracy in lap pace, while the 45/55/etc. line only has 5-second accuracy, my one complaint about the 45/55 line.
+1. You can set auto lap and play around with different distances. Maybe try 400m or 200m?
But even if you had 100% accurate instantaneous pace, how would that be practical? You would be constantly looking at your watch to adjust your pace. Even if you had something like glasses with a display, it would be counterproductive to try to make tons of micro adjustments to pace/effort.
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