Distance in Exercise

[Baxter76]

Hi, is it normal for walks that are autotracked, there is no distance data recorded? I only get info like steps, calories and zone minutes etc but no distance.

[LZeeW]

@Baxter76   Yes, it is absolutely normal for this to happen.  It is the way the feature is programmed.  I think it is this way because you can change the name of the exercise -- sometimes SmartTrack doesn't get it right.  I can't even begin to imagine the amount of programming to fix every wrong to right calculation.

[Baxter76]

I’m just surprised since I thought that distance will be a key metric to track for a walk. 

[LZeeW]

@Baxter76   You need to track a walk using the exercise app on the device to get distance.   Going back to my explanation, imagine if your walk got recognized as a run.  Stride lengths are different, so the engineers would have to add code to recalculate the distance when you re-categorized it.  Now imagine that it was recognized as something completely wrong.  There are too many possible wrong scenarios to try to fix.  Also, Fitbit only counts step based, one foot in front of the other activities to daily and lifetime distance totals.  Swimming and biking don't count to daily or lifetime totals.  I believe Fitbit made this decision to keep it simple.