How far is it round the Emirates? And why does it matter?
For more than a year now, I’ve been coaching some of my run group sessions round the outside of the Emirates Stadium. It’s a good place to run: well lit, no traffic and a wide, flat loop. Early mornings and late evenings year-round there’s plenty of other runners, dog walkers and skateboarders to nod at as you run laps.
There’s just one problem with it – it seems to be in some sort of North London GPS vortex and getting an accurate idea of how far you’ve run, is a bit tricky.
I have between 12 and 20 runners in a session and many of them have GPS devises to measure their efforts, and all of them have the same issues. You know the sort of thing: a wildly inaccurate wiggly line on your map and paces that are much faster or slower than you’d expect to see.
We know that GPS devises aren’t 100% accurate and they can play up from time to time, which is why you shouldn’t rely on them too heavily. The best way to get an accurate idea of your pace is with a measured distance (such as a track) and a stopwatch.
Of course, if you’re running the same loop or route every week, you don’t need to know how far it is to see if you’re getting faster. And my runners could compare this week’s 6x 1 lap of the Emirates to the same session a couple of months ago. But in order to see how your training pace measures up against your 5k or 10k pace, and to make sure you’re working at the correct effort, you’ll want to know the distance.
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One of my group emailed the info address for the Emirates Stadium to ask them how far it was round the outside of their building. The answer came back “600m”. This was much shorter than the 800m that out GPS readings had generally been measuring and we were skeptical about both distances. We estimated that the true distance we were running was somewhere in the middle.
An architects’ plan would give the building’s ‘footprint’ which would probably be the distance the Emirates inbox gave us. But we run a few meters out from the outer wall of the building. And while running in a circle will usually give you a shorter GPS reading than is correct (because the GPS will assume you ran the shortest distance between two points) we knew from the paces it was giving that the 800m was too long.
And that’s how I found myself, one very cold Thursday evening with another Laura, measuring the Emirates exterior with a trundle wheel. We measured the route my runners run close to the stadium and a larger loop that Laura runs, as well as the distances between certain statues. A runner was doing laps as we trundled round and was keen to find out our readings.
How far is it?
Inner lap (following the grate)
1 lap = 708m
Dennis Bergkamp to Tony Adams = 259m
Dennis to Herbert = 509m
Outer lap (running outside all statues)
1 lap = 803m
Dennis to Tony = 284m
Very good, numbers do matter.
Great idea where did you get the wheel from? Reminds me of school.
The other Laura is a parkrun race director and had it to measure her course. But apparently they’re £20 online.
Put your garmin in Indoor mode (this turns GPS off)and let it calculate the distance automatically. It does this by multiplying the. Number of steps by your average stride length. The average stride length is taken from all the GPS enabled runs you’ve accumulated. As long as you run at your most usual pace I find this to be incredibly accurate.
I also do this when my Garmin decides GPS isn’t going to play – rather than wait for minutes to find a signal, I put it Indoors mode and head off knowing that I am still going to get pretty accurate readings (and sparing the frustration of waiting for that signal!)
Ran round there the other night… two lads tried to put me off by running straight at me and into my direct path… 🙁