i’m running the NYC marathon soon and am wondering how folks have used their watches in world major marathons (i.e., highly dense, tall building obstruction).
i was planning on tracking from workouts, but also have strava.
i figure GPS will be unreliable, but is it worth it to try and manually lap each mile (only on workouts, not on strava), or basically just use it as a fancy stopwatch that can give some stats on HR and rough estimates of pace?
fwiw, i have a series 8, so don’t have a dedicated button to lap and would need to double tap.
any other tips?
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Use it for elapsed time and HR.
Distance won’t be reliable due to GPS issues amongst the tall buildings and not running the tangents perfectly.
If you have a goal time in mind, print out a pace chart and carry it. You can compare your elapsed time to the pace chart when you run past various mile markers.
I’m not familiar with the NYC marathon specifically, but at every other marathon I’ve watched or ran there are markers along the road telling you the elapsed distance. Some marathons will do every 5km, others every mile or every 3 or 5 miles. If you know which distance markers will be posted along the route you can manually create a lap at those places and use that to keep track of your pace.
DC Rainmaker did several GPS accuracy tests of different devices in different environments (including NYC center) and Apple Watch was reasonably good (worse than dual-band devices, but still decent enough).
I ran the 50th NY marathon in 21 wearing an AW. It was decently accurate. You really don’t encounter the tall buildings until like the last 5 miles if I recall. Last 2 miles to the finish is in Central Park. I have recently gone back to my Garmin due to battery life and Garmin notifies you when you left your phone behind by vibrating. AW does not do that or I haven’t figured out how to make it do that. AW just has a little visual alert on the top of the screen. Doesn’t help if you don’t look at your AW for a while.