Same distance, same watch, but different readings!

[Joanne28]

I run with two friends who both have a surge. We used the in built GPS. We ran  together and we all had different readings. The distance varied slightly by 0.1-0.4 on the three watches but the pace was widely out! My pace showed the slowest even though at the end I finished slightly ahead. The average pace was at least 30-45 seconds out on the three watches. How could this be when we were running mostly at the same pace and the exact same distance. 

I am regularly checking  my pace when I am out on my individual runs, training for a half marathon and I just don’t trust the mile pace at the moment. Please help! 

Jo

[YojanaFitbit]

I've noticed you are new around @Joanne28, so let me give you a warm welcome to our Community. 

Thanks for sharing your inquiry here and for giving all those details. It looks like your major concern is about the accuracy of your Surge. When it comes to pace, this is determined by the step rate in combination with GPS, this means that even when you guys were running together, each of you have a different step rate (even when you were running close to each other) and this will give different results for each person. A few seconds of difference in the pace for each of you is acceptable taking the previous statement into consideration.

In case that you wonder you can read more about how Fitbit calculate your distance here.

Hope this helps! 

[CardiganWearer]

@YojanaFitbit

what rubbish!

 pace is time over distance

it has nothing to do with stride length.

did you read the article you linked to??

@Joanne28the article suggests it might be the GPS signal at the start of the run