I hate having to wait to cross the road.
That's gonnna add precious seconds to my mile time. Best pause
my watch till them over the other side.
Um, rep on done. Best pause my watch.
Don't want those recoveries to be slowing down my average pace.
Do you pause your watch when you go out for a run?
Or do you just let it run? No pun intended.
I'm Rick and along with Anna, will be answering the question,
should you pause your watch? As well as giving you some alternatives to pausing
it, that will help you digest all that data from your runs.
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which we do every week.
We said, we'd answer the question, but it's a tricky one.
So we asked you what you do. And the majority said, yes,
you do pause your watch. When you go on a run.
The truth is there is no real right or wrong answer to this.
It really does depend on personal preference.
If you bump into a friend when you're out on your run and you stop to chat to them
for 10 minutes, then it's fair enough that you might not want to record that,
but we're going to have a look at some instances where you might want to think
about not pausing your watch. So for example,
you might be training for a race or a time trial.
And so if you're constantly pausing every time you stop,
then you're not going to get a complete picture of your session because it's not
taking into account your overall performance,
because you are getting some breaks for recovery in between.
If you're doing interval sessions, for example. So short bursts at a fast pace,
followed by a prescribed recovery.
That recovery time is there for you to get your heart rate down and well
recover. In fact, by recording your recoveries,
you'll be able to see afterwards how long it took for your heart rate to drop
something which should improve with fitness.
It's worth bearing in mind that if you do go out to do an interval session and
you do pause your watch for recoveries,
then it will only take into consideration the data that was recorded.
So you're moving time to inform things like training load and recovery.
So your overall picture of how your training is going,
could be slightly skewed by that.
You may also find yourself taking a break,
during a rum because it feels hard or you're uncomfortable at the pace that
you're running at. But running through that,
as long as it's not above your natural fitness levels is part of the mental
aspect of training. If you'd stop for a break on your training runs well,
what's the stop you're doing at joining the race or time trial.
So if you are out on a regular run and you're having to stop maybe to get past a
group of people or you need to cross the road and you are pausing your watch,
just bear in mind that this could be skewing your perception of the pace that
you're able to hit,
and probably more importantly maintain because your overall average
pace for that run will be a lot faster than what you were actually able to do,
because you were getting that recovery benefit from stopping. Now, of course,
we're not saying that it's not okay to stop to walk or even just stop to take a
break entirely. It's entirely down to you if that's what you want to do,
but just bear in mind that you could be setting yourself up for disappointment
if you're trying to hit a PB in that time trial,
because you're not able to actually hit the paces that you think you've been
hitting during training.
If you have paused your watch during your run, then most GPS watches and Strava,
will show you two different times, both your elapsed time and your moving time.
Elapsed time is the duration from the moment you hit start on your device
to the moment that you hit stop to finish that activity.
Moving time on the other hand is the amount of time that you are actually moving
during that time. Seems pretty straightforward.
So you'll find that places like Strava will generally prioritise your moving
time when showing activities in things like your feed and in your
training log. Unless that activity has been tagged as a race.
And in which case, it prioritises your elapsed time.
You'll get figures for both your average elapsed pace and your average moving pace.
So nice easy example.
If you run at 5k in 25 minutes with no breaks,
then your elapsed time and your moving time will both be 25 minutes.
Therefore your average pace across both of those is five minutes per kilometre.
If you run a 5k in 25 minutes,
but also pause your watch for five minutes during that time, because you had to,
tie your laces, pick up some dog poo or stop at some lights.
Then your average elapsed pace would be six minutes per kilometre,
but your average moving pace would be five minutes per kilometre.
You might have seen our video about getting a fast 5k time
by using just your moving time.
So I was able to get a sub 18 minute
5k on that occasion just by using short intervals and then some
recoveries that weren't recorded as part of the moving time.
In fact, when you look at the elapsed time for the activity took me an hour and 18 minutes.
If you have auto lap enabled on your watch,
it will automatically record your pace either every one mile or every one
kilometre, depending on which one you've got set up.
One way to record your recoveries is to turn off auto lap and use
manual lap instead.
this means that every time you want to record your hard efforts and your
recoveries, you can hit the manual lap button.
So if you do a hard effort for a certain distance or a certain amount of time,
then hit that manual lap button as you go into the recovery.
That means that when you get back afterwards,
you can go through your data and you can clearly see,
which of the laps is a hard effort and the pace that you run that at,
and which of them is your recovery.
A common question from people running interval sessions is how can you see the average pace of
only your hard efforts without having to calculate it manually since your
overall moving pace includes recovery.
If you're going out to do a specific session,
then you can program the workout into Garmin Connect before you head out
and then transfer it to your watch.
That means that it will automatically tell you what your intervals
are and what your recoveries are. So you can include your warmup,
your reps, your recoveries,
you can do repeats of them and also do your cool-down as well.
All of these can be set to different intensity targets as well.
So you can set things like pace, cadence and heart rate zones.
The benefit of doing this is that after your run,
you'll be able to toggle between the different sections of the workout that
you've just completed. So the warmup, run reps and recovery,
you'll be able to see the pace, distance and time of each of those sections,
including the average overall pace of just your hard intervals.
It's worth remembering though,
that if you are following a workout on your device,
some of them will automatically stop. As soon as that workout comes to an end.
So if you want to continue with your activity,
perhaps you want to extend your cool down,
or not quite got back to the house yet.
Then you'll just need to press the start,
stop button to make sure that you clock all those additional miles.
And let's not forget if you do manually pause your watch,
there's always that danger
you might forget to restart it again and then lose all that precious
run data. So top tip, if you do want to pause your watch,
have a look and see if you can set up an auto pause setting.
So your watch will automatically detect when you're slowing down or you come to
a stop and stop recording your activity or you're moving time for that
period. Then when you get going again, it'll start again.
So you're moving time and your elapsed time
at the end of the activity will be different if you use auto pause.
And don't forget that if you are doing an interval session,
that when you come to the end of your interval and you have auto pause turned
on, your watch will stop as you do your recovery, worth bearing in mind.
Do you pause your watch? Or maybe you're reconsidering after watching this video,
tell us in the comments below,
and we'll see you next time here on The Running Channel.