Mystery of the Missing Minutes: A Jogging Puzzle

I am in the final week of the Couch to 5k program (Week 9) and on Monday I did my first run in wet weather. The path at the park had a few puddles along the edges and was a bit squishy in spots but overall the experience was fine. Pretty much anything is better compared to the 30°C weather we’d been having (I will revise this after the first snow of the winter). I completed the mandated 30 minutes but something seemed amiss.

Going with how the plan equated time and distance I early on concluded that one circuit of the path — which takes about 3 minutes to run — equaled about 1 km. The final 30 minute runs in Week 9 would therefore require running 10 laps.

I started my run and by lap 7 I was thinking it was going faster than I expected. I decided to check the time after the 9th lap, which would put me at about 27 minutes in, more or less. Instead, I found only 18 minutes or so had elapsed. I kept running until I hit the 30 minute mark and by final count had done 14 or 15 laps instead of the expected 10.

Either my pace was significantly better than expected or my math sucked. Knowing how this whole thing began I suspected the latter. I was compelled to find out for certain and purchased a pedometer from MEC. My first task was to measure my stride length. To do so I took the tape measure to the walk in the backyard and marked out a 10 m section. I then walked it twice and verified 11 steps. 10×10= 100m and 11×10 = 110 steps, therefore my stride length is 100 ÷ 110 = .90 m or 90 cm. I set the pedometer to this and set off for a walking tour of the path at China Creek Park.

One full lap of the path gave me a distance of .58 km, which is more than I thought. 10 laps would equal 5.8 km, not 5 km. (8.5 laps would be just under 5 km.)

Since I had run about 15 laps in the half hour, I’d actually covered 8.7 km — 3.7 km more than the program expected of me. I am fairly boggled by this. I knew my pace was definitely faster but I had no idea it was that much faster.

In a few weeks I’m going to try to run a full 10k, which should work out to 17 laps. I’m going to recalibrate the pedometer tomorrow to match my stride length while jogging (8 steps vs. 11) and see how far it says I run in half an hour. More to come!

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