HIGEAR Scanner MARK11 Pedometer

Does anyone have any advise on how to set the above correctly. I had it set to what I thought was my correct stride but on running a half marathon on Sunday it told me I had only run 10.5 miles. However yesterday when I ran my normal 3.2 route (taken from the car) it is telling me that I did a distance of 3.3 which is quite close. How can I set to make sure it is giving me correct distances without having to check again or is this model (given as a present) just not up to scratch??

Susan, I'm sorry to disappoint you but pedometers (all models) are a waste of space. You've already spotted the obvious flaw which is that they rely on a constant stride length. You may find that your stride length is fairly constant over short distances but it is unlikely to be so over a range of distances and speeds and slight variations will give big errors in the pedometers reading.

If you want an accurate distance measure the best bet is to measure the route on a map. There is software available that makes this fairly easy e.g. Trailgauge or Accuroute. If you're not too bothered about accuracy at this stage and you can drive round your route just use the car odometer. All you really need is a stopwatch to time your run. Beware of using the stopwatch function of the pedometer because they only register while you're moving and they can miss seconds here and there - I certainly found this when I used one (the same model as yours I believe).

But don't despair, if your pedometer tells you how many steps / minute your taking then its not completely useless. Optimum running technique usually occurs at 180 steps per minute so use your pedometer to aim for this.

Tom
Thanks very much for your quick response on this. It is good to hear it was not something I was doing on the setup. It does give me steps/minute so will have alook at this next time. I really don't want an accurate distance just e.g. to nearest mile would have been good. Will not have to tell the person that gave it to me as a present though they thought it would really help!!!!

Susan,

If you can afford it (at least £120 - RRP £220), the Timex Speed Distance monitor is very good.

Two or three threads on this in the forum.

It gives pretty accurate measurments of distance, speed, pace etc by using GPS (track your movement by satallite, believe it or not and transfers data to a watch).

Supposed to be 98% accurate. I've had it for 3 months and love it.

But I guess you've got to be pretty keen to spend that sort of money.

cheers

Thanks but unfortunately as keen as I may be to have a good pedometer I think my husband would have a lot to say on spending that kind of money!! (small things like food could get in the way for money like that!!)