Monday, August 10, 2009

Mt Dis >> 8700' of gain

My Garmin says it's 14395' and my Garmin has seemed very accurate for my trail training here in SLC, when comparing to gains that I know exact measurements for. I was obviously pretty skeptical and figured that the trees threw it off, but I zoomed in really close and only found a handful of unrealistic looking little jagged spots in the profile, which I would expect a whole bunch of if it was inaccurate. I'm sure 14395' is still an overestimate, but everyone seems to assume it's at least 10k' and I'm willing to bet it's somewhere between the 2, probably around 12000'. The problem with their profile online is that it's way too broad. They basically just calculated the elevation at a handful of points that are pretty far apart and took the net between each point, which doesn't account for the rolling nature of the course all, so it's got to be off by a couple thousand feet. That's my 2 cents at least...

Note: Click on the images to see the entire things... For some reason they're getting chopped off on this page.

Their profile (not very accurate looking, says 8700 feet):

My profile (more realistic looking, says 14395'):
Note that mine shows up at about 47 miles. I forgot to restart it a couple times when going out of aid stations (I kept total time on a watch on my right arm and time running on my Garmin so I could see how long I was stopped for, but forgot to start for up to .75 miles a coupel of times, for a total of 1.5 to 2 miles missed). Also note that the one thing I've found inaccurate with my Garmin is that it sometimes straightens out what I've done on a very curvy course such as this one, so the distance is very often estimated a little short, which should make up for the other 1 to 1.5 miles.

Also note that miles 2-5 were modified a little bit this year, explaining the discrepency between them on the profiles.

2 comments:

  1. My garmin is WAYYYY off sometimes. I remember one time i went on a run starting at chantry and up to the top of mt wilson and then back down. it was like 16 miles and my garmin said that it had 10,000 of gain. LOL. obviously that was a little off. And a couple weeks ago i hiked mt baldy, which is like 13 miles, it said i went 7. Both of the runs had a ton of trees and so i think that messes up the data. so annoying!!!! but that race has to have more than 8000 ft of climbing for sure. but hey good job on your race!

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  2. Yeah, I agree, the Garmin is probably an overestimate, but their profile has to be an underestimate. Thanks!

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