Strava, or my GPS, or a number of factors, sometimes lead to me having completely crazy readouts after a run. I never really know that this is going on while I am running because I don't often look at my phone while I am actually doing the run, I just look at it afterwards.
Sometimes I get some crazy results such as me jumping over to the other side of town 4km away and jumping straight back in a flash. These results get tagged by Strava (or flagged, not sure which) but it is pretty funny and frustrating when it happens because it screws up my tracking of what I have done. I do try to take it in stride though because while it does boost my numbers for the week / month, I know that it is all fake.
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On this particular night I set out to do a relatively easy 4-6k at a medium pace and stopping whenever I feel like it. Since it is blisteringly cold here right now, me stopping for very long is not likely for long seeing as how the wind whipping off the lake is so chilling that it threatens to remove my headphones from my ears from time to time. With the right winter gear I actually prefer to run in this weather because there are so many fewer runners on the trail that would be packed in winter and fall, in particular. This time I only saw 2 other people running the entire time so that was a plus. I wonder how many of them saw me zip over to the other side of town in 1 second though.
I still post this stuff to my Strava page where I have something like 20 friends who also exercise and I leave it up there for a few days before I go and either alter it, or just delete it entirely. One only need to look at my splits to realize that this pace isn't possible? Can anyone actually run 16k at under 2mins / km?
The good news is that I think I achieved my goal of doing 4-6k, the bad news is that those crazy stats in the middle from kms 2 - 13 are all bogus. It's difficult to tell exactly where things went wrong but when I did stop at a prospective stopping point in front of my apartment building where I decide whether or not I have done enough I looked at my phone and just kind of laughed. For good measure I did another go around the block and then called it a day.
I think this is most likely happening because I live in a very urban area and there area lot of things interfering with the signal. There are tall buildings and probably 200 wifi access points that my phone has to contend with.
Anyway, it is amusing, but I don't keep this in my log as some sort of badge of pride, not to mention that even the partially ruined km that are logged at under 2 minutes screw up my real PB's of around 5 minutes. I'll delete them but they made me laugh in the meantime.