gps

“Every run felt a lot longer,” said Jacobs, 23, a three-time NCAA champion who recently turned pro. “That was one of my main problems. I wasn’t enjoying the run at all, I wasn’t enjoying the scenery around me. Instead, I was checking my watch every quarter mile to see how much I had left.”

GPS watches, such as those from popular brands Garmin, Suunto and Coros, are equipped with satellite technology and heart rate sensors that offer a full range of features. Want to know how far and how fast you’ve run? How many milliliters of sweat did you sweat in Central Park last weekend? What about your average stride length? Their frequency?

For many, a GPS watch is an extremely useful training tool. However, there are those, including world-class runners like Jacobs, who find it hard to understand the enthusiasm for the feature-packed watch. For them, the abundance of data on offer is more of a hindrance than a help.

And listen to this: Some runners don’t wear a watch at all, smart or regular. “I like to focus more on the feel of the run and everything else than the time,” Jacobs said.

Heather MacLean, an Olympic 1,500-meter runner, recalls a time in her life when she enjoyed the utility of a GPS watch. As a student at the University of Massachusetts, working in a neuroscience lab, she realized the importance of sleep – and most importantly, that she didn’t get enough of it. So she started using a Garmin Forerunner watch to monitor whether she was getting enough rest and adjust her schedule accordingly.

They rob me of the joy of running

Later, when she was racing professionally for the New Balance Boston team, she tried to consistently use the GPS watch, but had several problems with it. First, she kept forgetting to charge them. “I kept letting them run out and I’m so lazy about things like that,” she said. And secondly, Heather MacLean realized that her watch was robbing her of the joy of running.

“I hated that every run I felt like I had to check my pace and distance and everything else,” MacLean said. “So I just decided to stop it for a while and switch to regular watches.” She never went back to the smartwatch, and now 28-year-old MacLean wears a regular watch she bought for ten dollars at Walmart.

“I’m not under the pressure of feeling like I have to count every kilometer, and I’ve also improved my ability to listen to my body,” she says. “I have no qualms about skipping another training session when I feel tired. I’d rather tell my coach that I’m just going for a walk,” she added.

Sam Prakel was excelling at running at high school in Versailles, Ohio, when his team’s assistant coach introduced him to the magic of a GPS watch. Prakel invested in them, but it was a mistake. “I started running too fast and it was harder to recover from all my runs because I was focusing so much on pace,” Prakel said.

“I found out pretty quickly that it wasn’t good for me,” Prakel added, buying a regular Timex Ironman watch that he’s stuck with ever since. He became a five-time All-American while attending the University of Oregon and has been running middle and long distances in recent years.

The reigning U.S. indoor champion in the 1,500 and 3,000 meters has a system that works for him and is, in a sense, a throwback to the past. What did runners do before smartwatches? They had to guess. In Prakel’s case, 65 minutes of running corresponds to roughly ten kilometers, and a half-hour run to roughly four kilometers. He does not need more precise data.

“As long as I’m doing the same thing every week and I’m consistent, nothing else matters,” he said, adding, “I feel like I’m better off not having to worry about all that data.”

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