It couldn’t lock on gps, I stayed at home!

#spacesafetyespresso: ever wondered how our daily activities rely on satellite data? Picture this: it’s a rainy, misty morning, wind can make you fly and you have in your training plan 4km easy, 12x400m at 3:30/km, 2km easy. A hell of a unit. You almost stay at home, but the big day is coming and you put your shoes on and go outside into these close-to-perfect-running-conditions. You start the watch and wait. And wait. And wait.

The sound of… you know this watch sound already.

GPS signal acquisition failed.

You go back home. No training this day. At least you tried.

Powered by milions of runners each day! Enjoy your morning espresso and see you back on track!

How a regular runner can even stay on pace without the GPS nowadays? Well, there are some techniques, like running on track, but, frankly speaking, many of us, runners either don’t have access to a stadium or don’t know they do have access to stadium. I started my running journey 20+ years ago without a stopwatch, and after few years bought a first one - but not the gps-powered, one of the cheapest Casios. Once the smartphones were available, I tried running with Endomondo and then discovered ISmoothRun app - which served me well for many running years up until my running pace increased so that the phone became a balast. I bought SuuntoAmbitVertical3 (the blue one) and although mixed review at the beginning, it was my running friend helping to get hell of the units done. I upgraded it to s Suunto9 for better activity tracking and marathon map snapping. The snapping functionality I never used to be honest, but it is a great example how traditional maps can help pinpointing the location (and pace) in city environment. Now, if you know how GPS actually works in your watch, and how official distance is measured, you’re not shocked at the marathon that the watch tracks even half of a kilometer more than the official distance is supposed to be. Do you recall how many times the watch told you the kilometer hundred or so meters before the flagpole? Do you recall the runners talking that the organizers put the poles at wrong places? Without the gps the runners would just press the lap button on their dump stopwatches and run.

The satellite data already impacts our lives in ways we don’t even recognize:

• no gps no training
• gps but flagpoles are wrong (and hating the organizers)
• it is 10km or 9.9km? Both. Without official measurements according to athletics specs, it just the gps-based, fused-track (or whatever) assisted, hand measurement. I don’t even care now, I run until 10km is passed on the watch, or if I know the track well, and the watch gives me wrong results, I run as long as I should to reach the distance.