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parkrun thread

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Dibble 5 Jul 7:48pm, 5 Jul 2025 1,156 posts	Quote Pin Dibble My Garmin watch always recorded our local course as too long. Then I bought a new Garmin watch (all the same settings as far as I can tell) and it has always recorded it as too short.
marshallini 5 Jul 7:49pm, 5 Jul 2025 4,919 posts	Quote Pin marshallini My parkrun today came in at 2.97, there is plenty of tree cover and a few tight turns. I'm quite happy to take that as 5k. I stopped running and my watch half way up the finish chute at 20:55. Official time 20:51. I normally park a couple of miles away and jog to the start as my warm up, but today I'd volunteered to do the lower course pre race check so parked in the car park, When I collected my token I took it to my car without getting it scanned so I could get a photo of it, then took it back to get scanned, I did tell them what I was doing and they were good about it. It was my first "win" in 9 years.
RooA 5 Jul 7:59pm, 5 Jul 2025 3,201 posts	Quote Pin RooA Our course is definitely long. 3.15 miles. Some people get grumpy about that too. 😆 Oh well.
Metro_Nome 5 Jul 8:01pm, 5 Jul 2025 8,286 posts	Quote Pin Metro_Nome My home parkrun measures anywhere between 2.9 and 3.1 miles and I run it almost every week taking the same line- that’s an example of GPS fallacy if ever there was
Metro_Nome 5 Jul 8:01pm, 5 Jul 2025 8,287 posts	Quote Pin Metro_Nome ( I have been known to keep running to add a little at the end if I want a Garmin badge. But I pause to stay in order and take my token first!)
jda 5 Jul 10:16pm, 5 Jul 2025 18,941 posts	Quote Pin jda I’m pretty sure that Harrogate was short for my PB time there, the finish straight was in a clearly different location to normal on the garmin trace. But I can’t say I’m bothered by it.
paulcook 5 Jul 10:19pm, 5 Jul 2025 8,377 posts	Quote Pin paulcook I always find Darlington short (often under 3m) though I figure that's because it's a tightish anti-clockwise lap and possible some GPS shortfall because of lots of tree cover.
Goofee 6 Jul 8:00am, 6 Jul 2025 5,004 posts	Quote Pin Goofee Shortly after Prospect started I recorded every instance of the course (which I had wheel-measured several times) I could find on the orange site, there was a massive variance in the GPS distances measured but of course there was a normal distribution centred on 5k.
jda 6 Jul 9:08am, 6 Jul 2025 18,943 posts	Quote Pin jda I posted these last time this discussion came up. The bulk of the course is 3 laps with well-defined corners. There's simply no way these courses are the same length. For the second one, the start position has moved back a marginal amount but the finish is substantially different.
NZD 6 Jul 12:01pm, 6 Jul 2025 488 posts	Quote Pin NZD They probably measured the difference between the old and new start locations, multiplied by three (because it's 3 laps), then adjusted the finish point accordingly 🤣!