My running app screwed up and the results are amazing

in Sports Talk Social10 months ago

A new pizzeria opened up near my house that has the most amazing pepperoni pizza on the menu so I have had to introduce an additional amount of cardio into my life. This isn't always intense exercise... to be fair for the most part I am barely making 6.5 minute kilometers, which really doesn't impress anyone, least of all me. But the idea behind cardio is that doing any run (or walk) at any pace is far more beneficial than not doing it at all and this is something that a lot of people attempemting to lose or maintain their weight fail to understand.

Run tracking apps are a fantastic way of preventing this from happening but every now and then the GPS does something insane and that is exactly what happened to me today.


I use Strava because it is free and nearly devoid of advertisements. They do try to offer you the upgraded version for a fee but I don't see the point in doing that since all the features that I need it for are included in the free version.

Normally it is fairly accurate and since I don't have a sport watch I normally just run with the phone in my hand. Whatever, it could be more efficient but I am not super hardcore, I am a normie after all.

Today, my readings were absurdly off the mark and this is the first time this has happened to me.


I probably COULD run / jog / walk 32 km if I had to but this is not something I, or anyone else in the world, could pull off in less than an hour. When I finished and looked at the splits it was even more amusing to me.


I am not even terribly capable of running a 4 minute km... I probably could do one or even 2 but then I would probably be near death. There would have to be something chasing me that would kill me if I slowed down in order for me to pull that off.

Things get a bit silly when we start seeing 6 second km and later on 6 km in a row that I ran in 0 seconds. That is some pretty high-level athleticism there!

Thankfully, Strava is able to detect impossibilities and will "flag" any crazy results like this. For the time being I am leaving it up so that my fitness friends can join me in having a laugh but then I will delete it.

At the end of my morning run I probably ran 4km and had around a 6 min / km pace. I have no idea what caused all this and it is the first time it has ever happened. I have hundreds of recordings on Strava and this is the only one that is messed up so if you ask me, one screw up out of several hundred is an acceptable margin of error for a free app.

combo fatty.jpg
from athlete, to fat-lete, and back.... and I drank beer the entire time


Wow, that is impressive! My best one was a 5000km/h cycling top speed with Endomondo and my phone. That combination had a fair few oddities. Strava and my Garmin watch seem more reliable. Mind you, the @exhaust dapp said one of my runs averaged 0min/km. Such crazy results ought to be flagged up.

Have more !BEER

does your Garmin play MP3's right off of the watch? I want to get one of those because I am tired of carrying my phone with me.

My watch doesn't do that. I don't mind having my phone strapped to my arm too. I even got a call on my last run. It was just my son wondering where I was.



Yep, you are pretty fast... that's for sure :)