Tips and Guide on Running Watch

The best thing about running watches is that they give you freedom. This statement might sound counterintuitive—isn’t timing your run going to make you feel more pressured? Not when you do it correctly.
Yes, many runners use their watches to meticulously record all of their splits, that is, their intermediate times en route to a longer distance. That kind of timing can be good, especially when you’re doing specific workouts to improve your performance at an upcoming race. When you’re doing these kind of workouts, it’s sometimes hard not to feel like your entire worth as a runner for the time being is decreed by your watch.

But one of the main ways that I use my watch is on a regular, easy run when I feel like exploring. I love the feeling of freedom that running can give you—you head out your door, and it’s completely up to you where to go. If 10 minutes into your run, you feel like taking a detour off of your usual route, well, who’s stopping you? When you have a running watch on, you can make that detour and not wonder if you ran farther or shorter than usual. That’s because the main feature on these watches is a stopwatch, or chronometer. All you have to do is start the chronometer at the start of your run, go wherever you want, and stop the watch when you stop running.

Say you normally run for half an hour. If you feel like you’re running at about the same pace that you usually do, then you most likely are. There’s no use in quibbling with yourself about a potential extra tenth of a mile here or there. It’ll all even out eventually. This frees you to start your watch, head off in an unfamiliar direction for 15 minutes, turn around and run home.

The chronometer feature is especially useful when you’re traveling and have to run in completely alien territory. When I’m in a new place, I start my watch, run at my normal training pace for however long I want, and rest assured that I’ve gone about as far as I would at home. Using your watch this way is also a good way to make new courses at home. Say you have a loop through your neighborhood that you’re calling a three-miler. See roughly what your average time is for that loop over the course of several runs, and then chart out other courses that you can run in that time. These new courses will be about the same length as the neighborhood loop.