I’ve often wondered about the accuracy of my phone’s GPS and that of my Garmin Forerunner 205. Could they be equally good at tracking my workouts? I’ve used both before when I was doing interval workouts as Strava doesn’t allow for split timing. You could setup segments in Strava, but that’s a lot of work and would require fairly precise running. I never took the time to compare the data from those workouts. I think I felt that the amount of stopping and small movements wouldn’t be an accurate gauge.
On this mornings run I wore my Garmin and had the phone inside of the Chariot as I pushed the two kiddos on an 8.4 mile run. I had grabbed my Garmin because some little 15 month boy likes to hide things and had hidden my watch. I needed to protect my watch tan line (vanity…). The Garmin covers the area and now is quite useful!
Just for accuracy sake, I use a Garmin Forerunner 205 and have the LG Optimus X and was using the Strava app (discussed yesterday). I pulled the data from my Garmin into Dailymile. Not 100% sure why I did it there instead of RunningAhead which is where I tend to log most of my workouts, but I assume that the website won’t matter too much for this analysis.
| Garmin | Strava | |
| Distance | 8.4 | 8.5 |
| Time | 1:27 | 1:20:44* |
| Calories** | 910 | 1,568 |
| Elevation*** | 1,784 | 226 |
*Strava will differentiate between moving time and total time. Elapsed (total time) was 1:27:19. Crazy that the Chariot was stopped for 7 minutes, but we did stop for water a few times and a bathroom break for the 3.5 year old!
** This is probably not a device measurement but a website one.
*** This could be a reporting discrepancy… My guess is Dailymile is reporting total climb and Strava reports net gain or loss…
Here is a screenshot from the Dailymile entry followed by Strava’s “embed on blog”.
