What does pace mean?
What does pace mean?
I'm new to Garmin and can't figure out what the pace data represents.
I walked and had a pace of 12:47 /km
km/h wouldn't make sense, because 12 km/h would be too fast for walking.
What do the numbers mean?
Typically pace is measured in minutes per kilometre. So it measured you as taking 12 minutes 47 seconds to walk a kilometre.
Interesting. I wonder why they choose this format. I used a running-calculator now that converted it to 4.69 km/h, which is way easier to read and understand.
Human rate of motion is usually expressed as pace rather than speed; they are reciprocals of each other.
4.69 km/h is speed, whereas 12:42 (min:sec) / km is speed.
Garming measures and displayed both speed and pace. There's a variety of settings on watch and app regarding speed vs. pace.
Generally, I prefer pace as its easier to compare 1km, 5km and 10km pace and predict times.
One way to look at it is that "speed", in km/hr, is an instantaneous measure. As you walk, you speed up and slow down; maybe there are hills or something. That's not super useful to most people. What is useful is knowing "is this chunk of my walk/run slower or faster than the last chunk?". Someone running a 10k wants to know their average speed for each kilometer. Someone running or walking a shorter race might want finer splits, but it's convenient for comparison to still use 1 kilometer as the baseline because you have a better sense of what it feels like to walk a 12 minute km pace than a 6 minute half km pace, even if they are the same thing.