Forums >Suggestions and Feature Requests>Request: Elevation gain
Gandalf the Grey
Running ... just keep running!
Good Bad & The Monkey
I'm running somewhere tomorrow. It's going to be beautiful. I can't wait.
Poor baby
If you map your runs, it is there. When Eric adds GPS, it will be there too. You can add this to the comments too.
The elevation gain from GPS devices and mapping software (ie, Google) is wildy inaccurate.
I'm definitely aware of how GPS works and calculates elevation. I'm also aware that it's completely horrible at it, especially in very mountainous areas like where I live. My GPS said my last 50 mile run across the Grand Canyon and back had 38,500' of gain!!! In my book that would qualify as "wildly inaccurate" as the true gain is around 11,000'. During most trails runs around here (Boulder, CO), my GPS is off by a factor of 2 or more, which just isn't acceptable, hence the reason I still use a barometric altimeter.
(Sorry if that was too much detail I provided, I tend to prefer to err on not assuming knowledge) It sounds to me like the GPS device that you used was not corrected. When using the direct GPS readings, it can terribly overestimate the true elevation. When you use a correction, such as the motionbased.com gravity service (which replaces the elevation from the device with reference USGS data), it tends to be much better. Do you use motionbased? MTA: I have had numerous runs where the corrected and the uncorrected GPS readings were 2-5 times different, just as in your example.