Trust your body, not your fitness watch

This marathon training cycle, I’ve endured running in subzero conditions on New Year’s Eve, oppressive heat and humidity, and now the experience of running a half marathon in driving rain for more than two hours.

All things considered, I’ll take the rain over the other two every single time, even though it was easily one of the most miserable running experiences I’ve ever had.

I knew we were in trouble before the start of Sunday’s Rock N Roll Half Marathon when a light drizzle started falling about ten minutes before we crossed the starting line. If this was the worst of it, I thought, I’ll be fine. If not, it’s gonna be a slog.

The rain was, more or less, consistently falling throughout the race, save for dry spells that lasted a total of roughly 10–15 minutes. Otherwise, the rain was constant and steady throughout, reaching its crescendo towards the end of the race and soaking me with an additional 2–3 pounds of water weight.

That, in and of itself, was miserable enough. The lesson I learned on this particular run, however, is that you can’t trust your fitness watch to tell you accurately how fast you’re going.

Sunday’s race took us under street level in some parts, which messed up my watch’s GPS and tricked both the watch and me into thinking I was going faster than I actually was. My watch said I ran 14.06 miles yesterday, nearly a full mile than I actually ran.

That error proved problematic because it wound up in my watch screwing up my pacing. For instance, in the early parts of the race, my watch was telling me that I was running at roughly a 9 minute mile pace, which was way faster than I wanted to be going and way faster than I was actually going. Thinking I was running too fast and thus expending too much energy in the early stages of the race that I would need later on, I slowed down to conserve energy and save my legs.

That likely cost me a good 5–7 minutes at the finish line. My final time was okay, but not great. Given that most of the race was run in some of the most miserable weather conditions I’ve ever run in, I was happy just to finish, let alone finish within five minutes of where I’d run previous half marathons in better weather conditions.

The pacing issue did seriously cause me to rethink my relationship with my fitness watch on longer runs. I’ll continue to use it as a benchmark for distance and time. When it comes to the pace that I’m running at, however, I’m going to trust my body more moving forward than I am my watch to tell me how fast I should be going.

To learn more about Open Heart Magic, which has more than 120 volunteers that go around to Chicago hospitals and teach kids how to do magic tricks and is the charity that I’m running the Chicago Marathon for, please click here and consider donating.