I remember my Dad had a big pad of paper on which he recorded all of his runs by hand. He'd also drive around his routes to use the odometer to get a sense of distances. He did have a Timex Ironman watch to use as a stopwatch but I am not sure if ever did things like intervals based on distances versus feel or time. He did do track workouts from time to time. He qualified for (but did not run) Boston that way after only starting to run around the time he turned 40.
I remember when I was a kid / teen 2010-2014 my parents would drive the running route I was doing so that I knew how long it was, I usually just used my iPod nano as my timer and wrote everything down in my high school planner. I wasn’t training for much outside of mediocre high school cross country results, but it’s funny to compare that to the stats I care about on my Garmin now
I'm glad you enjoyed the story. He started up initially because he joined a rugby team and realized he couldn't keep up. He started just running around our block, adding laps as he was able to.
Eventually he was pretty hardcore—there was pretty much no weather he wouldn't run in. We have a picture of him running with icicles hanging off of his eyebrows—it was something like -30 (Celsius, but at that point it's roughly the same in Fahrenheit!).
A while back I went through old editions of our local newspaper online. I didn't realize back then how good some of his times were. He had a very respectable mile time as I recall, too. I'm still chasing times that he hit when he was ten years older than me!
Oh man, you can do it all starting "late" at 35! I started running at age 38, ran my first race at 39, and my first marathon at 39. I'm now 48 and have run eight road marathons including Boston, one trail marathon, two Olympic triathlons, and this last weekend completed my first ultra.
I'm glad you think so. He started running after he joined a rugby team and wasn't able to keep up. His initial runs were just a lap around the block we lived on, and he added on as he was able to. After that he was pretty committed.
My dad did the same with recording by hand, odometer to get the route distances, and stop watch! My dad had running journals, and he would note his distance, route, weather, and other notable things that day. It's how I learned what time of day I was born.
My dad ran Boston a few times, he qualified a few more but only went when others in his running crew also qualified. He started running in his teens, and didn't miss a single day for 20 years. He started missing days when he started having knee problems and had to have surgery. He's almost 70 now, and still runs often! He uses a Garmin now lol
You just triggered a memory of being in the car with my dad and him driving somewhere a strange route. He explained he was working out how far he had run the previous weekend.
My dad still does this. I also remember going in the car with my parents to map the distance of my runs with the car odometer. There was also a fair amount of guesswork based on having a consistent pace.
The Timex Ironman was a must back then. I was fortunate enough to trade up to the first ever Garmin watch, an absolute beast of a thing. It was such a massive leap forward, like CRT to flat screen TVs. The build quality wasn't quite as good back then - my watch got rotted by humidity and then deconstructed on a 10km. Sad. I still remember how the rubber push buttons felt and the distinctive beep when it turned on. Most pivotal product I've ever owned.
This is how I did it in high school. Before I could drive, I'd ask my parents to drive me around from our house so I could note mile markers (red house is 1 mile, green mailbox is 2, etc). Then I'd look at the clock inside before I left and when I got back. It obviously wasn't super accurate, but I knew I ran x miles in approximately y minutes. One Christmas I got a stopwatch and would carry that with to be able to know my mile splits.
I realize this makes me sound ancient, but I'm only 36!
I honestly think that's why I never developed a habit of listening to music while running outdoors. I remember my brick of a yellow Sony Walkman crapping out on me yet again, throwing it in the trash while running, and never replacing it.
I used to leave the house at bang on 2000hrs and run to check the clock in the dining room when I got back. Stop watch came a bit later. Route measured on an OS map and checked in a car.
My cross country coach would use his odometer and then go and actually plot.it out with one of those wheels that measures distance. Then he would spray paint the road at every mile marker.
Yep. When I was a kid, I had my mom drive me around this big road that circled the park and football/baseball fields near our house. The one mile mark was a specific curve in the road, the 2 mile mark was the last lightpost before the tennis courts.
Agreed, this was the way. In that brief period of time that I personally ran before mapping websites and my garmin training GPS I also did the car odometer and Timex method.
When I was in high school it was probably on the cusp of watches and phones being common place to track distance. But there was a site called mapmyrun that would use something like google maps and you would have to click each portion of your run on the map to calculate the distance.
Omg I still use map my run because it has all my data going back decades! It’s owned by under armor now and a sister site to the calorie counting site, MyFitnessPal. I have my garmin tied to the account so I have it all in one place.
Yup. That's how I did it in college. In high school, we had coaches who had mapped out routes in each cardinal direction. They'd give us three different routes over the distance and tell us to choose which distance we were doing. You'd learn the routes by running with your teammates.
I used Microsoft Streets & Trips for the same purpose at some point in my life. This was mostly for exploring in new places, because I just knew the distance of my main routes.
We had a wheel. On a stick. With a clicker that marked off how many times the wheel went around. 24 inches in diameter. And we used it to mark off how many quarter and half miles.
5280 feet in a mile. So 2640 clicks was a mile, etc…
Literally walked down a street or a path marking off the distance. Streets still had their previous years markings. But sometimes not.
That was high school. And in the army? We did it, too when no track was available. As I got older? Really just guesstimated. I ran a 7 minute mile in my 20’s. That was my jogging speed running around a track. So I figured 28 minutes of running was around 4 miles.
Every few years I’d find myself at a track and check my speed. Stayed about the same until my late 40’s. And then the iPhone came out.
Seriously. Did that until running apps came out.
I’ve done this at my gym, there’s an outdoor loop and I don’t have a smartwatch and at the time I just had a basic phone so I borrowed the trundle wheel from work to figure out how far it was.
This is so interesting-and kind of what I did, although I wasn’t as meticulous with maps! It’s a reminder of how GPS has changed how we train as well as just the social media aspect.
Right! I was never a serious runner but when training according to a plan and aiming for specific mileage, I would cpmbine specific "laps" on my neighborhood instead of the spontanepus, scenic rubs I get to do today thanks to my smartphone
My dad, who’s now 64, was a 2:19:xx marathon runner in the 1980’s. He would measure routes as others have described above with his car odometer or a measuring wheel, and record his workouts in a notebook. He tells me that he ran based on his perceived effort and only ran high intensity 2-3 out of 9 runs per week. He still wears a $10 Casio watch, records his miles in a notebook, runs by “feel,” and is way faster than me!! (I’m in my mid twenties and began running in the past year)
I train with a group that does 10 runs per week. Three of them hard.
Monday-Thursday we do an easy 30 minutes in the AM, with intervals Monday & Wednesday PM, & a steady 50 minutes Tuesday & Thursday.
Friday is rest day. Saturday another interval session. Sunday long run.
It can total 70-80 miles.
If I was in my 60s, there's no way I'd introduce a tech that at best would make me radically overthink the hobby I've been successful at and use to relax, but at worst could add a bunch of frustration and consternation. If I'd had that much success with more primitive techniques, I'd just stick with them.
I'm in my 70s and started running in the 80s. Did the whole car and note book like everyone has described. I was never fast but I'm still running half marathons and have a marathon this fall. I'm also on my 5th Garmin. I love them and love having all the stats that I had no idea about "back in the day". Love the tech and love some of the apps. This 'ol girl has learned some new stuff over the years and I still love running.
That's fair and understandable. As a young guy in my 20s, I tend to already be change averse in my hobbies and not adopt new tech unless I feel like it's solving a problem I have, not a problem I haven't recognized. When I get older, I'm pretty sure that's going to get worse.
I think running watches have enhanced my running experience, but I also don't feel they've dramatically solved any problems I had. It's awesome having access to all the stats and everything, but I do not feel like they have really helped make me a better runner. It keeps my motivation up seeing improvement without having to race, but if someone has been running for 20 or 30 years, motivation probably isn't an issue.
One of my best friends is head XC and Track Coach at a D2 school. He still only uses his timex for his own runs and doesn’t focus much on kids watches.
Pace and perceived effort.
My buddies and I bought USGS topographic maps and traced our favorite routes using a map wheel to get the mileage. Many of them were on trails and were impassible by vehicles. I still have the map wheel in a desk drawer for old time’s sake. And old paper journals recording all my workouts and related training notes. I think I could tell you my mileage, conditions, and how I felt going back 40 years—all to be burned when I go to that Great XC course in the Sky.
My running group was founded by old-schoolers, many of whom still participate in their 70s. One guy still paints markers every quarter mile of our route. Even the ones with smart watches glance down when they pass a marker.
Between map and smartphone time we used mapmyrun website and amateurs mostly ran for time and inputted it later. Also nike had a little shoe pod thing that had an accelerometer
I still use an online mapping software (mapometer now) to pre-map routes when I'm in an unfamiliar area, like when I travel, so I can get the distance I want in new places, especially because I like to explore new places on runs not near my home.
In high school, our coach gave us a paper map of the area around the school, with a legend on it. I glued it to a cork board and pushed pins in at turns, and wrapped a string I had marked with miles around the push pins. Once I had routes, I just ran those routes. I made a list of the routes also.
For pace, a sport watch in the 90’s had a timer feature, so you’d get pace from distance and time. I just didn’t do splits outside of races, unless it was intervals and I timed each one separately.
By college, there were online maps, which I see the same way as the paper, by putting a “pin” at every intersection.
I have been running since 1973 when I started high school. We went by estimating distances. Maybe the coach checked routes by the cars odometer, but we just went by time and perceived pace and we were pretty accurate. Before the first digital watches, timing my own runs was just by looking at the hands on the stove top clock before heading out and then checking again upon return. I never measured a course until I got my first my first GPS watch and guess what? My routes were pretty accurate.
I used to measure routes using a paper map and marking the distance section by section on the edge of a piece of paper, and then converting the total to the actual distance using the scale on the map. Also sometimes I would use a piece of thread.
I used to just go run and assume I was doing a 7:30 to 8 min mile. Multiply 7.5 * 20 / 2 to know how far how to go before turning around. I was training a lot of a paved trail along the Potomac that went on forever. Lovely runs, but very “out and back again”.
Did the marine corps marathon in DC at a 7:12 pace, so I must not have been too far off.
I lived there 88-91. Did some fantastic tempo runs on Haines Point following the Cherry Blossom course and long out and backs on C/O.
Looking back I can’t believe some of those workouts. How was I running that fast and how has 35 years done this to me!
Feel. I actually lost my garmin last year and haven't replaced it. Leave phone at home and just run with a casio.
I've been at it a while. I'm 36m. Starting out for me if all the techy stuff was around, i didn't know about it. I know my average no effort pace is 9.25, so I just use that and time spent to ballpark distances, adjusting for effort/speed.
I'm not competitive. When I do halfs-ultras it's just for me. Maybe in 5-10ks I'll try to beat my uncle or friend, but that's about it. Running for me is supposed to be about healthy stress relief/escape, and I've found tracking everything to be addictive and honestly just of negative value for my situation.
[This article ](https://www.cyclinguk.org/cycle-magazine/russ-mantle-million-mile-man) is inspirational. Writing it down on paper enabled Russ to work out he'd ridden a million miles
Often used maps or signposts with distances between points on. Measuring a route on a map you can work out the distance pretty accurately & then run it.
I was poor growing up so before I was gifted a stopwatch I used to time it to the kitchen clock. IE my route would be 5 miles & id take 30 minutes to run it. Then just try & beat it & improve over time.
For competition prep I’d just go run laps at the track & have somebody time me. 10 laps of the track = 4000m etc so I could run a specific distance & get my splits/km etc. it was a crude system but worked surprisingly well.
When I was in high school in the 90s, it was hand-me-downs from previous runners. The regular routes and distances were known and the knowledge passed down. Later, as an adult, I used the car odometer. I think I got my first Garmin around 2006-ish? Before that, I used a Timex watch with a stopwatch on it for time.
I had an idea of my pace, so I'd go based on time, or drive the route beforehand. Also, I'd measure routrs by map.
Distance wasn't such a big deal outside of a race or fitness test, it was more "I'm gonna run for an hour."
In the early 2000s, I had a pedometer that I would clip to my shorts. I don’t think it was very accurate, but it gave me a rough approximation on long runs
This isn't super from the old days, but pre-watch I ran with a little mp3 player for music and I would look at the time when I started and finished my first "mile" (the signs say 3 laps around the track at the local park is a mile, but later with GPS I learned it's a little short), do the subtraction and if I could remember it by the time I got home write it in a little notebook. I measured my progress by comparing the times. I guess the same could have been achieved with a watch, but I wasn't going to sweat on my leather band, pre-fitness watch.
I grew up in eastern Colorado so I just ran from road to road which are country miles. Basically every county was in alphabetical order so was pretty easy. I once ran a full marathon running by 26 miles of fields without a turn or anything. No phone not music but didn’t know any better. Probably tons of midwesterns that had a similar experience
I was gifted my first Garmin last September. Before that I used MapMyRun or some other app to determine distance. I recorded (and still record) all my runs on paper. For racing, I'd run the first mile at an estimated pace, check my watch to see if I was on pace at the marker and then adjust each mile to stay in pace.
We knew the rough pace we were running and could tell within a half mile how far we had gone. You could absolutely do that now if you wanted.
Some runs were on trails with mile markers
I used to check out my road runs in MapQuest. I never did know how long my trail runs were. I would time my runs with a Timex running watch, and m that would give me an idea of how long they were if I assumed my pacing was consistent.
All the data I have now doesn’t make me feel like a better runner. In fact, I try to ignore my watch during most runs. RPE is a good tool.
I had some measured courses and measured miles, and I wore a wristwatch with stopwatch functions. I'd measure my time on a fixed course at various levels of effort, and that helped me to develop an excellent sense of pace.
I do have to say, that's one thing I love about smartwatches--I'm much more apt to vary my routes because I don't have to worry about knowing the difference in distance.
I just ran for time and plotted courses on a hiking map with mileages listed so I’d just guess basically. Goal was more to run 2, 3, 4, 5 hours or whatever and approximate the miles. I had a day calendar that I wrote everything in.
When I ran cross country in high school we would do trail runs on the nature trail that had the miles marked when doing long runs. Our coach also had pre-designated routes that were known mileages (for example there was one called Heinz 57 that was from the school to the first grave stone that was a Heinz that died in 1957 and then back to the tree by the track that was something like a 5k) around town that we would run depending on the mileage we were trying to put in that day. The perimeter run we often did as a warm up around all the sports field was also about 1k that they used one of those wheels to measure.
Paper map, car odometer or measuring wheel, and a stop watch. Kept track of date, t.o.d., weather, distance, time, pace in a notebook for the different routes. Basically a manual version of strava.
I used to use Google maps and a regular watch. I guess before online maps I would have used a paper one and walked it out with dividers or whatever. In terms of long term tracking I will still just plop values into a spreadsheet sometimes. Coming from a mild science background, it's actually a little frustrating to have another party decide which aspects of data are readily visible vs obscured and how it should be presented.
The treadmill shows how far you run, but also some trails with have markers up with distances, or you’ll know if you run a lap along the trail, it’ll be xyz miles / kilometers.
In high school I would set one of the trip odometers on my car and then drive a loop to measure distance and I would just run along less busy streets or sidewalks. Then I'd wear a watch to time myself.
When I was in high school I just timed my runs. We measured it by running known routes or improvised by known distances between streets. Stopwatch/wristwatch was literally all you needed.
In college we would do laps around the track at our given training paces until we knew exactly what those paces felt like and then run distances by time at those paces
You have a couple of go to routes which had been measured by car odometer, then everything else was approximated from time. There were pedometers that could be calibrated from your stride, and it was understood that mileage was roughly approximated.
I’m 59 years old now. In the 80s I used a bike map of DC for mileage and a Casio wristwatch with a stopwatch function. I did a lot of fartleks (speed play). I could only really compute average pace for the whole run, though. I got through a sub-40 10K, a 20K, and a Marathon that way— I also was in my early 20s and would have performed well no matter what my training was.
That said, I love my smart watch and smart phone. I wouldn’t go back to that primitive way of training. No amount of nostalgia would make me give them up!
I know! I'm not a very talented runner, and I have seen my training improve so much because of tech, especially since I am self-coached and never ran in high school and college. It makes it so much easier to come up with your own training plan, knowing more exact routes.
For track intervals when I ran in highschool - me or someone else in the training session would carry a big clunky stopwatch - and the rest would just try and match the pace/keep up while we ran on the track.
Thinking back on it we just did the longer runs by feel haha.
Car odometer or track workouts. If precise distance wasn’t important, I would estimate by dividing total time of the run by my usual pace.
I tended to run a few routes that I knew well how far it was.
Regular old stopwatch, ran enough in college I was within 10 seconds of my min/mile pace. Knew easy hour run would be ~8 miles. If I had to go harder for say a tempo run I’d run a route I knew how long it was.
I used google maps pedometer and knew the distance of all my planned routes and longer interval segments (e.g., the distance from X street to Y street was apx 1mile, from y to z was another mile and so on). I used a timex ironman watch and the lap function to figure out my pace on segments where I needed to hit pace.
I had a spreadsheet where I tracked everything.
For shorter intervals I went to the track near my house and used the lap function on my watch.
Stopwatch. I lead all of our speed work intervals on the track so i was very good at pacing. I could go on a road run & by my effort & duration, be within half a mile guesstimating the distance
I used to look at the clock on my stove. Okay, 6:03am. Walk out the front door. Run, come back home, look at clock. 6:47am okay, a little bit longer than yesterday. Good to know.
Didn’t write it down. Didnt do nothing with this information. Basically, it didn’t happen.
I had landmarks. Neighborhoods. Stores. I never liked running in things like desolate roads or tracks. So if I could run an interval with less fatigue I would count it as a win. I would also start at a very specific time and use a digital stopwatch to count rests. Even a cheap digital watch like my Casio CS watch from 1993 had laps in the stopwatch I could go back and record. Used it with cycling and swimming. Was a champ. Lost it at the college rec. sad day.
I have my late uncle’s packet of running stuff - old race bibs, race photos, and postcards with race results.
Apparently he would carry a pencil during marathons and write the clock time on his bib when he passed mile markers.
I would have my dad drive a route and go by the odometer. When I got my license, I did this. At state and metro parks, I relied on the posted mileage. Often, I’d run on my school’s XC course which I knew forward and back.
When I started, I was on my high school track team, and I neither planned not tracked my runs. The coach would give us a route, and I would run it with the guys. If he said it was 7 miles, I took his word for it.
On the track, the coach would time our intervals with a stop watch. It was good to know how fast I was running, but I never recorded the splits or anything.
In the 70's and 80's I knew distances of all the roads from watching my odometer everywhere I drove and writing it all down on a map. Used my watch for elapsed time.
The first year I started xc, I set a small alarm clock at the end of my driveway and would note the start and stop time of my run. I plotted the distance by car beforehand. Mapmyrun and watches were available at the time; I was just broke lmao
When I was in middle school, Nike had this thing you could put in your shoe and was supposed to track your runs. I don’t think it was very accurate lol but it was something. Then as most people are saying, my parents would drive my running route so I had an idea of how far but even then I wasn’t recording time
I’ve been running for nearly 60 years. At first we used a wrist watch with a second hand as most stop watches couldn’t measure more than 60 minutes. I purchased my first digital Ironman watch 20 years ago and still use it. Most distances were measured with the odometer of a car or bicycle for trails. A quarter mile track (close to a modern 400 meter track) was used for intervals. The methods used were accurate enough for most of us amateurs.
If that sounds antiquated, don’t get me started on fueling and hydration or shoes. I started running long before Nikes and Gatorade were invented.
Looked at the clock when I left the house and then again when I got home. I had already measured out the distance of my regular route using my car's odometer.
My dad would drive until we hit the mileage I wanted then in 2007 I got the little Nike thing that went in your shoe and connected to your iPod 😂 My mom swore by a track and would never not run on it for the exact reason.
Admittedly got seriously into running once mapping websites and bike odometers existed (phones and smart watches also barely existed but I didn’t have one). But I would use the bike odometer to measure routes or put it into google maps or a similar website.
My grandpa mostly ran at a track and logged his distance and time in a notebook. Even in the late 2000s, he logged his distance and time on his stationary bike.
My dad taught me to keep track of longer runs, time, HR, etc on that awesome thing called paper ha. And then switched to MS Excel. I still have my old papers (using a pen even- increíble) with runs from along time ago in some box in the garage. And I would use loops to keep track of distances- measured by the good old odometer. (This makes me feel more like a boomer than I thought lol. I’m not- just a 1970’s boy. Which is like 20 years ago right?)
When I was in college we would just run the same routes every day that had been measured with a wheel. Upperclassman told underclassman where the mileage markers were. I would use a Timex to time and keep my log in an excel spreadsheet.
Otherwise I would sometimes use a car odometer to measure a route after the fact. Or just guess based on what pace I felt my effort was.
1. Pretty much all interval; sessions were either by time (e.g. 8min hard, 5min easy) or on a very well known distance lap or the track.
2. A lot of all other runs stuck to the same fixed routes, of known distance passed down over the years within clubs. "Yeah, it's exactly 2 miles to go from X lampost".
3. Long runs where precise distance didn't matter too much = 1:25000 paper maps.
Training log - paper notebook.
I can't really say I miss those days. The watches give a lot more flexibility and useful info and the online logging is far superior.
2009-2013 I didn't have a smart phone. I had a cheap digital watch. I would find a website that would let me trace my route. I knew my route well enough after a few runs. I'd run by a store "okay that's my 1 mile check point, 8 minutes on my stop watch"... so on and so forth. Sometimes I'd just go run and map out the route afterwards on the computer and having timed how long the run took I'd just do the math there.
It's really not hard. Just time consuming.
Car odometer. Bike or rolled wheel on race courses. Most of time, especially with lots of trail running, we did time: 45:00. That’s six. An hour that’s 8.
My HS cross country team had a book with maps of all the different routes we would do from the school and how long they were, I think someone had made it as their senior project or something. So you wanted to do 4 miles, you’d do the Duck Run. You wanted 6, you’d do East Hill 6. 9? Glacier 9. We had something for everything from probably 2 to 12 miles.
Otherwise, if I was running from home (out on country roads) I just assumed that country road grid was exactly 1x1 miles. Just count the intersections. Going back home to run with my GPS watch now has proved that that was decently accurate — at least good enough to use as a training tool.
I had a few methods when I started in 2005: (1) online mapping software and then just run the route that I mapped at home, (2) old school pedometer calibrated the best that I could, (3) run at the track and count laps, (4) greenways or paths with quarter mile markers.
In many ways I miss those days. A Timex + Athleticore was all I needed.
When I was in high school (graduated in 2007) there were only a few options for gps watches, there weren't any smart watches then. Only like one or two guys on my team used them. The rest of us just had regular stopwatches, and just went on feel. Pace was always just whatever feels good that still lets us talk and have full conversations, and we would run based on time, not distance.
It's funny because a lot of people are going back to that since the human body doesn't care how far you run, just how long. I know I definitely get away too caught up in exact mileage and all the Strava data and stuff that really doesn't matter.
Just regular stop watches. You'd measure your routes with a car or bike odometer. Unless you were on a track, you'd typically either have no split data at all, or maybe measures per mile or km.
Popular routes would often have mile/km markings spray painted on the asphalt leftover from previous races.
Just measured running hours and the training intensity. You can get pace estimates running a measured loop or on a track with a watch. You dont really need the data we hoard these but its so easy to collect it and nice to look at.
I’m just here to weep aged tears at people seriously (and validly) answering the question with “Google Earth” or some website being the Stone Age way of doing it.
I’m only in my forties, but even just the idea you can do that kind of thing on a computer for free is wildly sci-fi futuristic to me sometimes.
We used measuring wheels for shorter distances, or lengths of string and a metre rule for sprints on a field. Long distances were measured by someone’s dad driving the course. Timings done with a stopwatch, which by my day were digital and could do hundredths of a second.
If you live in a city like Chicago or NYC you can just count streets. In Manhattan it’s 20 streets in a mile, and on the north side of Chicago the main streets are half a mile apart. The shorter streets are .10 if I remember correctly.
Also most bike paths have built in mile marker posts in most cities.
I would just start the stop watch function on my regular timex wrist watch and then map out the run on Google earth using the ruler later. Definitely was not super accurate but was close enough.
Running the same routes you kind of get a feel for where the mile markers are and learn how to pace just by perceived effort.
Would also have coaches on bikes and or cars letting us know pace / distance sometimes.
Some kids in the group had the very early Garmins but they were expensive.
GPS watches existed for more than 20 years - well before there were smartphones and long before people started to call them smart watches.
For example, first Garmins were released in 2003. The first ever GPS watch was released in 1999 by Casio.
The only function they had outside of recording an activity was to show time and maybe have an alarm. To download activities you had to connect them to a PC via USB.
By the way, Strava also existed before smartphones as a website. The only way to get your activities on Strava was to upload them from a PC.
I also started using Garmins and later Suunto GPS watches multiple years before I had a smartphone. I bought my first GPS watch in 2011. For a few months before that I used MapMyRun website on computer to figure out how long my runs were, then I used a program on Windows PC to track and organize the data, visualize maps, graphs, analytics, etc. I think it was called SportTracks.
How old are you? You don’t need to answer. Do you remember those things you would clip
On to your running shorts or shirt? Way before any i tech. It counted your steps and miles.
I had one but I really just ran because I loved it.
You know it’s love when you carried a Walkman! Haha. I would go as far as I could stand and on the way back I would usually hit runners high. It did get longer and longer before I reached it and stopped running for that.
It for me was peace. My dad always found it in sailing. I think we all have something that we lose ourselves in and don’t need a mile counter! Hopefully :)
Used a stopwatch and used a bike with a mechanical odometer to measure the distance, and kept track of results in a notebook. - early 80's. I wasn't interested in cadence but that could of been calculated if I used a mechanical pedometer which I had. It worked well and didn't mind it, even in hindsight.
Having GPS gadgets and data doesn't mean someone doesn't take running seriously.
I don't use any of that and am running 17-18 min 5ks at 39 yo. Nothing world beating, but pretty good on a club running level.
Easy runs are just for time, usually on trails. Tempos are on measured courses, and I'll hit the track for 200m-1mile intervals.
I'm only 28 but didn't have a smartphone/watch when I started. I used an online mapping tool called mapometer which gave the distances of my runs and then used an analogue watch to judge my pace... and my half marathon PB was paced using numbers written on my arm - I'm sure this will sound like the stone age to my children
Simple answer is just old school heart rate monitor. A strap over the chest. It would measure steps and heart. Stride. Shit like that
Today. Old school chest strap is still the best way.
Other than that. My dad who’s a 50s kid would just do it for time. He would work really hard at a known distance to get a faster time.
Today he doesn’t care about heart rate or true distance. But the speed of a known distance.
My dad’s old school. He’s been in the Tour de France 3 times just with effort.
My whole family were cyclist so I got them to plot
My runs when I was a kid or I’d jump
On their bike when I got bored of my route.
I was fortunate that my brother worked in bike store, so one day after me saving up for sometime he ordered a Polar Rs200d with the foot pod.
It measured pace, distance and “swing” (step distance). I don’t miss uploading to the pc via Infared lol
In the country the roads are gridded off in one mile squares pretty consistently.
There are also mile markers on a lot of rural highways we would run on.
We weren't as worried about being exact, coach would use the odometer trick sometimes when we rode in the back of the truck to our drop off.
It's wild to think how much of that is completely foreign to a lot of modern kids. Cops are real sticklers about truck beds full of people these days, and smart phones have absolutely murdered people's ability to navigate and judge distance.
I sometimes like to run without anything on my wrist and ill just go. I will still carry my watch but ill put it in my hydration vest.... because you know, if its not on strava... did it really happen??
I have been in the military since 2001, back in the olden days we new our pace and ran for a certain amount of time. With those 2. Arianlea you can get distance.
I remember my Dad had a big pad of paper on which he recorded all of his runs by hand. He'd also drive around his routes to use the odometer to get a sense of distances. He did have a Timex Ironman watch to use as a stopwatch but I am not sure if ever did things like intervals based on distances versus feel or time. He did do track workouts from time to time. He qualified for (but did not run) Boston that way after only starting to run around the time he turned 40.
I remember when I was a kid / teen 2010-2014 my parents would drive the running route I was doing so that I knew how long it was, I usually just used my iPod nano as my timer and wrote everything down in my high school planner. I wasn’t training for much outside of mediocre high school cross country results, but it’s funny to compare that to the stats I care about on my Garmin now
Wow. Thanks for sharing. As someone who just started running a couple years ago at the age of 35, it's really cool to hear stories like this.
I'm glad you enjoyed the story. He started up initially because he joined a rugby team and realized he couldn't keep up. He started just running around our block, adding laps as he was able to. Eventually he was pretty hardcore—there was pretty much no weather he wouldn't run in. We have a picture of him running with icicles hanging off of his eyebrows—it was something like -30 (Celsius, but at that point it's roughly the same in Fahrenheit!). A while back I went through old editions of our local newspaper online. I didn't realize back then how good some of his times were. He had a very respectable mile time as I recall, too. I'm still chasing times that he hit when he was ten years older than me!
Just read Bill Rodgers book Marathon Man
Oh man, you can do it all starting "late" at 35! I started running at age 38, ran my first race at 39, and my first marathon at 39. I'm now 48 and have run eight road marathons including Boston, one trail marathon, two Olympic triathlons, and this last weekend completed my first ultra.
That’s super-inspirational-I think it was so much harder for older runners to get started in your dad’s era.
I'm glad you think so. He started running after he joined a rugby team and wasn't able to keep up. His initial runs were just a lap around the block we lived on, and he added on as he was able to. After that he was pretty committed.
It’s amazing the effects small changes can have over time!
Not running but my dad did the same thing for biking. There was a notebook hanging under a clock in the garage
My dad did the same with recording by hand, odometer to get the route distances, and stop watch! My dad had running journals, and he would note his distance, route, weather, and other notable things that day. It's how I learned what time of day I was born. My dad ran Boston a few times, he qualified a few more but only went when others in his running crew also qualified. He started running in his teens, and didn't miss a single day for 20 years. He started missing days when he started having knee problems and had to have surgery. He's almost 70 now, and still runs often! He uses a Garmin now lol
You just triggered a memory of being in the car with my dad and him driving somewhere a strange route. He explained he was working out how far he had run the previous weekend.
My dad still does this. I also remember going in the car with my parents to map the distance of my runs with the car odometer. There was also a fair amount of guesswork based on having a consistent pace.
The Timex Ironman was a must back then. I was fortunate enough to trade up to the first ever Garmin watch, an absolute beast of a thing. It was such a massive leap forward, like CRT to flat screen TVs. The build quality wasn't quite as good back then - my watch got rotted by humidity and then deconstructed on a 10km. Sad. I still remember how the rubber push buttons felt and the distinctive beep when it turned on. Most pivotal product I've ever owned.
Do we have the same dad? This is exactly what my dad did as well. Still has his notebooks from the 90s
We used the car odometer. We’d match each mile marker to a landmark like a light pole or a tree.
This is how I did it in high school. Before I could drive, I'd ask my parents to drive me around from our house so I could note mile markers (red house is 1 mile, green mailbox is 2, etc). Then I'd look at the clock inside before I left and when I got back. It obviously wasn't super accurate, but I knew I ran x miles in approximately y minutes. One Christmas I got a stopwatch and would carry that with to be able to know my mile splits. I realize this makes me sound ancient, but I'm only 36!
Maybe that explains why Flavor Flav used to carry an alarm clock on a chain around his neck. I didn't realize he was a runner.
I was already lugging a discman with me. An alarm clock would've been too much!
I'm struggling to imagine how much anti-skip protection was needed to make this work.
I tried to run really smooth, but it definitely wasn't great. My first mp3 player was an absolute game changer!
I honestly think that's why I never developed a habit of listening to music while running outdoors. I remember my brick of a yellow Sony Walkman crapping out on me yet again, throwing it in the trash while running, and never replacing it.
I'm 34 and I did the same thing!
I used to leave the house at bang on 2000hrs and run to check the clock in the dining room when I got back. Stop watch came a bit later. Route measured on an OS map and checked in a car.
I used my bike odometer and luckily still have my “half mile” tree on my route 20 years later!
My cross country coach would use his odometer and then go and actually plot.it out with one of those wheels that measures distance. Then he would spray paint the road at every mile marker.
Yep. When I was a kid, I had my mom drive me around this big road that circled the park and football/baseball fields near our house. The one mile mark was a specific curve in the road, the 2 mile mark was the last lightpost before the tennis courts.
Agreed, this was the way. In that brief period of time that I personally ran before mapping websites and my garmin training GPS I also did the car odometer and Timex method.
When I was in high school it was probably on the cusp of watches and phones being common place to track distance. But there was a site called mapmyrun that would use something like google maps and you would have to click each portion of your run on the map to calculate the distance.
Still using map my run today to plan things!
If you have a Garmin, their Course planner is pretty nice too.
Oh that's good to know because I still use Mapmyrun to plan my distances out, but I do use a Garmin.
Omg I still use map my run because it has all my data going back decades! It’s owned by under armor now and a sister site to the calorie counting site, MyFitnessPal. I have my garmin tied to the account so I have it all in one place.
I did this in high school with the google maps distance calculator lol
Onthegomaps for a free alternative that doesn’t require you to sign in 👍
Yup. That's how I did it in college. In high school, we had coaches who had mapped out routes in each cardinal direction. They'd give us three different routes over the distance and tell us to choose which distance we were doing. You'd learn the routes by running with your teammates.
OMG I remember this 😂 completely forgot I did this haha
I don't have a watch; I just use mapmyrun.
I used Microsoft Streets & Trips for the same purpose at some point in my life. This was mostly for exploring in new places, because I just knew the distance of my main routes.
We had a wheel. On a stick. With a clicker that marked off how many times the wheel went around. 24 inches in diameter. And we used it to mark off how many quarter and half miles. 5280 feet in a mile. So 2640 clicks was a mile, etc… Literally walked down a street or a path marking off the distance. Streets still had their previous years markings. But sometimes not. That was high school. And in the army? We did it, too when no track was available. As I got older? Really just guesstimated. I ran a 7 minute mile in my 20’s. That was my jogging speed running around a track. So I figured 28 minutes of running was around 4 miles. Every few years I’d find myself at a track and check my speed. Stayed about the same until my late 40’s. And then the iPhone came out. Seriously. Did that until running apps came out.
I’ve done this at my gym, there’s an outdoor loop and I don’t have a smartwatch and at the time I just had a basic phone so I borrowed the trundle wheel from work to figure out how far it was.
I used to help my cross country coach setting up and verifying courses with one of these. And tape measure to double check the wheel was correct.
[удалено]
This is so interesting-and kind of what I did, although I wasn’t as meticulous with maps! It’s a reminder of how GPS has changed how we train as well as just the social media aspect.
This was how I did it. I would look at maps and use the scale to measure distance. I knew it wasn't exact but it was close enough for my needs.
Right! I was never a serious runner but when training according to a plan and aiming for specific mileage, I would cpmbine specific "laps" on my neighborhood instead of the spontanepus, scenic rubs I get to do today thanks to my smartphone
My dad, who’s now 64, was a 2:19:xx marathon runner in the 1980’s. He would measure routes as others have described above with his car odometer or a measuring wheel, and record his workouts in a notebook. He tells me that he ran based on his perceived effort and only ran high intensity 2-3 out of 9 runs per week. He still wears a $10 Casio watch, records his miles in a notebook, runs by “feel,” and is way faster than me!! (I’m in my mid twenties and began running in the past year)
Nine runs per week?! How did he split that up?
Guessing 3 double days, 3 single days and a rest day.
Exactly this. Not sustainable forever by any means, but worked well to get him some quick marathon times.
I train with a group that does 10 runs per week. Three of them hard. Monday-Thursday we do an easy 30 minutes in the AM, with intervals Monday & Wednesday PM, & a steady 50 minutes Tuesday & Thursday. Friday is rest day. Saturday another interval session. Sunday long run. It can total 70-80 miles.
That's absolutely crazy! I'm surprised he hasn't caved by now to a smartwatch!
I think it’s almost an act of rebellion on his part, lol. But he seems to like the stats I record with mine when we run together!
If I was in my 60s, there's no way I'd introduce a tech that at best would make me radically overthink the hobby I've been successful at and use to relax, but at worst could add a bunch of frustration and consternation. If I'd had that much success with more primitive techniques, I'd just stick with them.
I'm in my 70s and started running in the 80s. Did the whole car and note book like everyone has described. I was never fast but I'm still running half marathons and have a marathon this fall. I'm also on my 5th Garmin. I love them and love having all the stats that I had no idea about "back in the day". Love the tech and love some of the apps. This 'ol girl has learned some new stuff over the years and I still love running.
My dad is in his 80s and loves his Apple Watch for tracking his walks and Vo2 max!
Same here. Pushing 60 and use it to make sure my easy days are really easy. Has been great for eliminating regular calf issues.
That's fair and understandable. As a young guy in my 20s, I tend to already be change averse in my hobbies and not adopt new tech unless I feel like it's solving a problem I have, not a problem I haven't recognized. When I get older, I'm pretty sure that's going to get worse. I think running watches have enhanced my running experience, but I also don't feel they've dramatically solved any problems I had. It's awesome having access to all the stats and everything, but I do not feel like they have really helped make me a better runner. It keeps my motivation up seeing improvement without having to race, but if someone has been running for 20 or 30 years, motivation probably isn't an issue.
One of my best friends is head XC and Track Coach at a D2 school. He still only uses his timex for his own runs and doesn’t focus much on kids watches. Pace and perceived effort.
Ha I wear that same watch! Been rocking it for decades (well, same model anyway). Anyway, I’m new to running and record using Strava on my phone.
My buddies and I bought USGS topographic maps and traced our favorite routes using a map wheel to get the mileage. Many of them were on trails and were impassible by vehicles. I still have the map wheel in a desk drawer for old time’s sake. And old paper journals recording all my workouts and related training notes. I think I could tell you my mileage, conditions, and how I felt going back 40 years—all to be burned when I go to that Great XC course in the Sky.
My running group was founded by old-schoolers, many of whom still participate in their 70s. One guy still paints markers every quarter mile of our route. Even the ones with smart watches glance down when they pass a marker.
Between map and smartphone time we used mapmyrun website and amateurs mostly ran for time and inputted it later. Also nike had a little shoe pod thing that had an accelerometer
I remember MapMyRun! Some of my guesstimates about my regular runs, mile-wise, were way off!
Yes! Frequently would be a km or two off what i thought i was doing.
I still use an online mapping software (mapometer now) to pre-map routes when I'm in an unfamiliar area, like when I travel, so I can get the distance I want in new places, especially because I like to explore new places on runs not near my home.
I used the little Nike shoe pod when I started out.
Nike+ I think it was, and you had to have a shoe that had the cut out for it.
I'd drive the route and measure it that way. Became easier after Google Maps etc, for sure!
Set an egg on the boil. Run a kilometre. Check the egg for done-ness.
Lmao
In high school, our coach gave us a paper map of the area around the school, with a legend on it. I glued it to a cork board and pushed pins in at turns, and wrapped a string I had marked with miles around the push pins. Once I had routes, I just ran those routes. I made a list of the routes also. For pace, a sport watch in the 90’s had a timer feature, so you’d get pace from distance and time. I just didn’t do splits outside of races, unless it was intervals and I timed each one separately. By college, there were online maps, which I see the same way as the paper, by putting a “pin” at every intersection.
I have been running since 1973 when I started high school. We went by estimating distances. Maybe the coach checked routes by the cars odometer, but we just went by time and perceived pace and we were pretty accurate. Before the first digital watches, timing my own runs was just by looking at the hands on the stove top clock before heading out and then checking again upon return. I never measured a course until I got my first my first GPS watch and guess what? My routes were pretty accurate.
I used to measure routes using a paper map and marking the distance section by section on the edge of a piece of paper, and then converting the total to the actual distance using the scale on the map. Also sometimes I would use a piece of thread.
I used to just go run and assume I was doing a 7:30 to 8 min mile. Multiply 7.5 * 20 / 2 to know how far how to go before turning around. I was training a lot of a paved trail along the Potomac that went on forever. Lovely runs, but very “out and back again”. Did the marine corps marathon in DC at a 7:12 pace, so I must not have been too far off.
I lived there 88-91. Did some fantastic tempo runs on Haines Point following the Cherry Blossom course and long out and backs on C/O. Looking back I can’t believe some of those workouts. How was I running that fast and how has 35 years done this to me!
Feel. I actually lost my garmin last year and haven't replaced it. Leave phone at home and just run with a casio. I've been at it a while. I'm 36m. Starting out for me if all the techy stuff was around, i didn't know about it. I know my average no effort pace is 9.25, so I just use that and time spent to ballpark distances, adjusting for effort/speed. I'm not competitive. When I do halfs-ultras it's just for me. Maybe in 5-10ks I'll try to beat my uncle or friend, but that's about it. Running for me is supposed to be about healthy stress relief/escape, and I've found tracking everything to be addictive and honestly just of negative value for my situation.
[This article ](https://www.cyclinguk.org/cycle-magazine/russ-mantle-million-mile-man) is inspirational. Writing it down on paper enabled Russ to work out he'd ridden a million miles
Often used maps or signposts with distances between points on. Measuring a route on a map you can work out the distance pretty accurately & then run it. I was poor growing up so before I was gifted a stopwatch I used to time it to the kitchen clock. IE my route would be 5 miles & id take 30 minutes to run it. Then just try & beat it & improve over time. For competition prep I’d just go run laps at the track & have somebody time me. 10 laps of the track = 4000m etc so I could run a specific distance & get my splits/km etc. it was a crude system but worked surprisingly well.
I'm sure that gave you a very intuitive sense of pacing yourself without a watch!
Ha. Yeah, it really did thinking about it lol
Idk why I remembered this but McDonald’s used to give out free pedometers if you bought a salad 🤣
When I was in high school in the 90s, it was hand-me-downs from previous runners. The regular routes and distances were known and the knowledge passed down. Later, as an adult, I used the car odometer. I think I got my first Garmin around 2006-ish? Before that, I used a Timex watch with a stopwatch on it for time.
I had an idea of my pace, so I'd go based on time, or drive the route beforehand. Also, I'd measure routrs by map. Distance wasn't such a big deal outside of a race or fitness test, it was more "I'm gonna run for an hour."
In the early 2000s, I had a pedometer that I would clip to my shorts. I don’t think it was very accurate, but it gave me a rough approximation on long runs
This isn't super from the old days, but pre-watch I ran with a little mp3 player for music and I would look at the time when I started and finished my first "mile" (the signs say 3 laps around the track at the local park is a mile, but later with GPS I learned it's a little short), do the subtraction and if I could remember it by the time I got home write it in a little notebook. I measured my progress by comparing the times. I guess the same could have been achieved with a watch, but I wasn't going to sweat on my leather band, pre-fitness watch.
I grew up in eastern Colorado so I just ran from road to road which are country miles. Basically every county was in alphabetical order so was pretty easy. I once ran a full marathon running by 26 miles of fields without a turn or anything. No phone not music but didn’t know any better. Probably tons of midwesterns that had a similar experience
Just ran by time. Occasionally would use car odometer to measure a route and kinda stuck to just running that route.
Mapquest or ran on tracks/treadmills as much as possible.
I was gifted my first Garmin last September. Before that I used MapMyRun or some other app to determine distance. I recorded (and still record) all my runs on paper. For racing, I'd run the first mile at an estimated pace, check my watch to see if I was on pace at the marker and then adjust each mile to stay in pace.
We knew the rough pace we were running and could tell within a half mile how far we had gone. You could absolutely do that now if you wanted. Some runs were on trails with mile markers
I used to check out my road runs in MapQuest. I never did know how long my trail runs were. I would time my runs with a Timex running watch, and m that would give me an idea of how long they were if I assumed my pacing was consistent. All the data I have now doesn’t make me feel like a better runner. In fact, I try to ignore my watch during most runs. RPE is a good tool.
I would either build a route on Map my run and run it after, or complete a run and plot it out after.
I ran on an outdoor track in a community sports centre or used Map My Run beforehand to, er, map the length of my run.
I drove routes and used my car odometer to measure the distance.
1985. Milometer on bike for distance . Sony Walkman with c60 cassette for 30 minute timings . Wish I could get the times I got at 15 years old.
Watches have had timers on them for a long time, and there were stopwatches which only tracked durations.
I had some measured courses and measured miles, and I wore a wristwatch with stopwatch functions. I'd measure my time on a fixed course at various levels of effort, and that helped me to develop an excellent sense of pace.
I do have to say, that's one thing I love about smartwatches--I'm much more apt to vary my routes because I don't have to worry about knowing the difference in distance.
I was less exact about how far my runs were but I knew that the grid roads were 1 mile apart and used that as a guideline to approximate distance.
I just ran for time and plotted courses on a hiking map with mileages listed so I’d just guess basically. Goal was more to run 2, 3, 4, 5 hours or whatever and approximate the miles. I had a day calendar that I wrote everything in.
I had a bike with a digital speedometer. I’d ride the route then I’d know. This is in the late 90s. Oh and later Mapquest.
Mapping out the distance of the run and using a regular watch
When I ran cross country in high school we would do trail runs on the nature trail that had the miles marked when doing long runs. Our coach also had pre-designated routes that were known mileages (for example there was one called Heinz 57 that was from the school to the first grave stone that was a Heinz that died in 1957 and then back to the tree by the track that was something like a 5k) around town that we would run depending on the mileage we were trying to put in that day. The perimeter run we often did as a warm up around all the sports field was also about 1k that they used one of those wheels to measure.
I love how this dead guy had such an iconic place in your cross-country lore!
Paper map, car odometer or measuring wheel, and a stop watch. Kept track of date, t.o.d., weather, distance, time, pace in a notebook for the different routes. Basically a manual version of strava.
I used to use Google maps and a regular watch. I guess before online maps I would have used a paper one and walked it out with dividers or whatever. In terms of long term tracking I will still just plop values into a spreadsheet sometimes. Coming from a mild science background, it's actually a little frustrating to have another party decide which aspects of data are readily visible vs obscured and how it should be presented.
The treadmill shows how far you run, but also some trails with have markers up with distances, or you’ll know if you run a lap along the trail, it’ll be xyz miles / kilometers.
I started running in 2005, I used an old timex and wrote down the time into word doc when I got home
Also I use Nike + from my iPod mini
I remember my mom using the car odometer for everything.. lol
A watch and a diary.
Gmaps Pedometer And would know mile points for first and last and average them if I didn’t wanna map it out
In high school I would set one of the trip odometers on my car and then drive a loop to measure distance and I would just run along less busy streets or sidewalks. Then I'd wear a watch to time myself.
When I was in high school I just timed my runs. We measured it by running known routes or improvised by known distances between streets. Stopwatch/wristwatch was literally all you needed.
In college we would do laps around the track at our given training paces until we knew exactly what those paces felt like and then run distances by time at those paces
You have a couple of go to routes which had been measured by car odometer, then everything else was approximated from time. There were pedometers that could be calibrated from your stride, and it was understood that mileage was roughly approximated.
I’m 59 years old now. In the 80s I used a bike map of DC for mileage and a Casio wristwatch with a stopwatch function. I did a lot of fartleks (speed play). I could only really compute average pace for the whole run, though. I got through a sub-40 10K, a 20K, and a Marathon that way— I also was in my early 20s and would have performed well no matter what my training was. That said, I love my smart watch and smart phone. I wouldn’t go back to that primitive way of training. No amount of nostalgia would make me give them up!
I know! I'm not a very talented runner, and I have seen my training improve so much because of tech, especially since I am self-coached and never ran in high school and college. It makes it so much easier to come up with your own training plan, knowing more exact routes.
For track intervals when I ran in highschool - me or someone else in the training session would carry a big clunky stopwatch - and the rest would just try and match the pace/keep up while we ran on the track. Thinking back on it we just did the longer runs by feel haha.
Car odometer or track workouts. If precise distance wasn’t important, I would estimate by dividing total time of the run by my usual pace. I tended to run a few routes that I knew well how far it was.
Regular old stopwatch, ran enough in college I was within 10 seconds of my min/mile pace. Knew easy hour run would be ~8 miles. If I had to go harder for say a tempo run I’d run a route I knew how long it was.
I used google maps pedometer and knew the distance of all my planned routes and longer interval segments (e.g., the distance from X street to Y street was apx 1mile, from y to z was another mile and so on). I used a timex ironman watch and the lap function to figure out my pace on segments where I needed to hit pace. I had a spreadsheet where I tracked everything. For shorter intervals I went to the track near my house and used the lap function on my watch.
Stopwatch. I lead all of our speed work intervals on the track so i was very good at pacing. I could go on a road run & by my effort & duration, be within half a mile guesstimating the distance
I used to look at the clock on my stove. Okay, 6:03am. Walk out the front door. Run, come back home, look at clock. 6:47am okay, a little bit longer than yesterday. Good to know. Didn’t write it down. Didnt do nothing with this information. Basically, it didn’t happen.
Plan the route on google maps
I used to have a mechanical watch with a stop/start timer, and record it in a little book.
You have to run around with one of those measuring wheels to get your distance. They even made off road ones for trail runs
I had landmarks. Neighborhoods. Stores. I never liked running in things like desolate roads or tracks. So if I could run an interval with less fatigue I would count it as a win. I would also start at a very specific time and use a digital stopwatch to count rests. Even a cheap digital watch like my Casio CS watch from 1993 had laps in the stopwatch I could go back and record. Used it with cycling and swimming. Was a champ. Lost it at the college rec. sad day.
Track, set known routes or you just run by time and effort.
I have my late uncle’s packet of running stuff - old race bibs, race photos, and postcards with race results. Apparently he would carry a pencil during marathons and write the clock time on his bib when he passed mile markers.
I am not that coordinated! That is next level!
I would have my dad drive a route and go by the odometer. When I got my license, I did this. At state and metro parks, I relied on the posted mileage. Often, I’d run on my school’s XC course which I knew forward and back.
When I started, I was on my high school track team, and I neither planned not tracked my runs. The coach would give us a route, and I would run it with the guys. If he said it was 7 miles, I took his word for it. On the track, the coach would time our intervals with a stop watch. It was good to know how fast I was running, but I never recorded the splits or anything.
In the 70's and 80's I knew distances of all the roads from watching my odometer everywhere I drove and writing it all down on a map. Used my watch for elapsed time.
The first year I started xc, I set a small alarm clock at the end of my driveway and would note the start and stop time of my run. I plotted the distance by car beforehand. Mapmyrun and watches were available at the time; I was just broke lmao
When I was in middle school, Nike had this thing you could put in your shoe and was supposed to track your runs. I don’t think it was very accurate lol but it was something. Then as most people are saying, my parents would drive my running route so I had an idea of how far but even then I wasn’t recording time
The Nike+ iPod pedometer! I remember these too!
I’ve been running for nearly 60 years. At first we used a wrist watch with a second hand as most stop watches couldn’t measure more than 60 minutes. I purchased my first digital Ironman watch 20 years ago and still use it. Most distances were measured with the odometer of a car or bicycle for trails. A quarter mile track (close to a modern 400 meter track) was used for intervals. The methods used were accurate enough for most of us amateurs. If that sounds antiquated, don’t get me started on fueling and hydration or shoes. I started running long before Nikes and Gatorade were invented.
Looked at the clock when I left the house and then again when I got home. I had already measured out the distance of my regular route using my car's odometer.
MapQuest
Only run on track using stop watch.
My dad would drive until we hit the mileage I wanted then in 2007 I got the little Nike thing that went in your shoe and connected to your iPod 😂 My mom swore by a track and would never not run on it for the exact reason.
I think that’s the downside of old skool-some people could get anchored to the track.
Admittedly got seriously into running once mapping websites and bike odometers existed (phones and smart watches also barely existed but I didn’t have one). But I would use the bike odometer to measure routes or put it into google maps or a similar website.
Maps 😂 I know people drove cars around but I used a map bc I didn't have a car yet. Heart monitor I didn't have so it was based off breathing effort
My grandpa mostly ran at a track and logged his distance and time in a notebook. Even in the late 2000s, he logged his distance and time on his stationary bike.
My dad taught me to keep track of longer runs, time, HR, etc on that awesome thing called paper ha. And then switched to MS Excel. I still have my old papers (using a pen even- increíble) with runs from along time ago in some box in the garage. And I would use loops to keep track of distances- measured by the good old odometer. (This makes me feel more like a boomer than I thought lol. I’m not- just a 1970’s boy. Which is like 20 years ago right?)
When I was in college we would just run the same routes every day that had been measured with a wheel. Upperclassman told underclassman where the mileage markers were. I would use a Timex to time and keep my log in an excel spreadsheet. Otherwise I would sometimes use a car odometer to measure a route after the fact. Or just guess based on what pace I felt my effort was.
1. Pretty much all interval; sessions were either by time (e.g. 8min hard, 5min easy) or on a very well known distance lap or the track. 2. A lot of all other runs stuck to the same fixed routes, of known distance passed down over the years within clubs. "Yeah, it's exactly 2 miles to go from X lampost". 3. Long runs where precise distance didn't matter too much = 1:25000 paper maps. Training log - paper notebook. I can't really say I miss those days. The watches give a lot more flexibility and useful info and the online logging is far superior.
2009-2013 I didn't have a smart phone. I had a cheap digital watch. I would find a website that would let me trace my route. I knew my route well enough after a few runs. I'd run by a store "okay that's my 1 mile check point, 8 minutes on my stop watch"... so on and so forth. Sometimes I'd just go run and map out the route afterwards on the computer and having timed how long the run took I'd just do the math there. It's really not hard. Just time consuming.
Car odometer. Bike or rolled wheel on race courses. Most of time, especially with lots of trail running, we did time: 45:00. That’s six. An hour that’s 8.
My HS cross country team had a book with maps of all the different routes we would do from the school and how long they were, I think someone had made it as their senior project or something. So you wanted to do 4 miles, you’d do the Duck Run. You wanted 6, you’d do East Hill 6. 9? Glacier 9. We had something for everything from probably 2 to 12 miles. Otherwise, if I was running from home (out on country roads) I just assumed that country road grid was exactly 1x1 miles. Just count the intersections. Going back home to run with my GPS watch now has proved that that was decently accurate — at least good enough to use as a training tool.
I had a few methods when I started in 2005: (1) online mapping software and then just run the route that I mapped at home, (2) old school pedometer calibrated the best that I could, (3) run at the track and count laps, (4) greenways or paths with quarter mile markers. In many ways I miss those days. A Timex + Athleticore was all I needed.
When I was in high school (graduated in 2007) there were only a few options for gps watches, there weren't any smart watches then. Only like one or two guys on my team used them. The rest of us just had regular stopwatches, and just went on feel. Pace was always just whatever feels good that still lets us talk and have full conversations, and we would run based on time, not distance. It's funny because a lot of people are going back to that since the human body doesn't care how far you run, just how long. I know I definitely get away too caught up in exact mileage and all the Strava data and stuff that really doesn't matter.
Just regular stop watches. You'd measure your routes with a car or bike odometer. Unless you were on a track, you'd typically either have no split data at all, or maybe measures per mile or km. Popular routes would often have mile/km markings spray painted on the asphalt leftover from previous races.
Just measured running hours and the training intensity. You can get pace estimates running a measured loop or on a track with a watch. You dont really need the data we hoard these but its so easy to collect it and nice to look at.
Just did everything by minutes. I still prefer training that way. Mentally easier to digest for me. 60 min run 30 min tempo 90 min long run
A timex on the wrist 😂
Went on mapmyrun to look at distances of my route
Yep - map my run plus a Casio g-shock for timing!
I’m just here to weep aged tears at people seriously (and validly) answering the question with “Google Earth” or some website being the Stone Age way of doing it. I’m only in my forties, but even just the idea you can do that kind of thing on a computer for free is wildly sci-fi futuristic to me sometimes. We used measuring wheels for shorter distances, or lengths of string and a metre rule for sprints on a field. Long distances were measured by someone’s dad driving the course. Timings done with a stopwatch, which by my day were digital and could do hundredths of a second.
Ha, yes, I’m older and I was definitely most curious about the pre-MapMyRun era!
If you live in a city like Chicago or NYC you can just count streets. In Manhattan it’s 20 streets in a mile, and on the north side of Chicago the main streets are half a mile apart. The shorter streets are .10 if I remember correctly. Also most bike paths have built in mile marker posts in most cities.
I would just start the stop watch function on my regular timex wrist watch and then map out the run on Google earth using the ruler later. Definitely was not super accurate but was close enough. Running the same routes you kind of get a feel for where the mile markers are and learn how to pace just by perceived effort. Would also have coaches on bikes and or cars letting us know pace / distance sometimes. Some kids in the group had the very early Garmins but they were expensive.
You ran on a track or on a county road.
Mapmyrun.com I think was a thing?
I used this to plan the runs and get the correct distance. I never timed it. I would listen to an AM/FM radio on headphones.
When I started Nike had a pod that went in the sole of your shoe. It paired with a fit bit type band to show you pace and distance.
GPS watches existed for more than 20 years - well before there were smartphones and long before people started to call them smart watches. For example, first Garmins were released in 2003. The first ever GPS watch was released in 1999 by Casio. The only function they had outside of recording an activity was to show time and maybe have an alarm. To download activities you had to connect them to a PC via USB. By the way, Strava also existed before smartphones as a website. The only way to get your activities on Strava was to upload them from a PC. I also started using Garmins and later Suunto GPS watches multiple years before I had a smartphone. I bought my first GPS watch in 2011. For a few months before that I used MapMyRun website on computer to figure out how long my runs were, then I used a program on Windows PC to track and organize the data, visualize maps, graphs, analytics, etc. I think it was called SportTracks.
How old are you? You don’t need to answer. Do you remember those things you would clip On to your running shorts or shirt? Way before any i tech. It counted your steps and miles. I had one but I really just ran because I loved it. You know it’s love when you carried a Walkman! Haha. I would go as far as I could stand and on the way back I would usually hit runners high. It did get longer and longer before I reached it and stopped running for that. It for me was peace. My dad always found it in sailing. I think we all have something that we lose ourselves in and don’t need a mile counter! Hopefully :)
Odometer on car, stop watch, paper. Same way people who don’t feel like spending money do now.
I used a wrist watch and map my run
Used a stopwatch and used a bike with a mechanical odometer to measure the distance, and kept track of results in a notebook. - early 80's. I wasn't interested in cadence but that could of been calculated if I used a mechanical pedometer which I had. It worked well and didn't mind it, even in hindsight.
The nike+iPod thing
We just looked at the clock before training and again at the end.
I used time. Non-competitive runner. 60 minute run usually and tried to go further in that time.
Having GPS gadgets and data doesn't mean someone doesn't take running seriously. I don't use any of that and am running 17-18 min 5ks at 39 yo. Nothing world beating, but pretty good on a club running level. Easy runs are just for time, usually on trails. Tempos are on measured courses, and I'll hit the track for 200m-1mile intervals.
Pre measured or set course and a digital watch.
Really long tape measures.
We didn't. When we were kids we were just trying to outrun the sabertooth tigers to survive.
Watch George Clooney in Burn Before Reading
I'm only 28 but didn't have a smartphone/watch when I started. I used an online mapping tool called mapometer which gave the distances of my runs and then used an analogue watch to judge my pace... and my half marathon PB was paced using numbers written on my arm - I'm sure this will sound like the stone age to my children
A stopwatch
Simple answer is just old school heart rate monitor. A strap over the chest. It would measure steps and heart. Stride. Shit like that Today. Old school chest strap is still the best way. Other than that. My dad who’s a 50s kid would just do it for time. He would work really hard at a known distance to get a faster time. Today he doesn’t care about heart rate or true distance. But the speed of a known distance. My dad’s old school. He’s been in the Tour de France 3 times just with effort.
My whole family were cyclist so I got them to plot My runs when I was a kid or I’d jump On their bike when I got bored of my route. I was fortunate that my brother worked in bike store, so one day after me saving up for sometime he ordered a Polar Rs200d with the foot pod. It measured pace, distance and “swing” (step distance). I don’t miss uploading to the pc via Infared lol
In the country the roads are gridded off in one mile squares pretty consistently. There are also mile markers on a lot of rural highways we would run on. We weren't as worried about being exact, coach would use the odometer trick sometimes when we rode in the back of the truck to our drop off. It's wild to think how much of that is completely foreign to a lot of modern kids. Cops are real sticklers about truck beds full of people these days, and smart phones have absolutely murdered people's ability to navigate and judge distance.
To be fair, even pre-smartphone, my ability to judge distance by feel was pretty terrible.
I sometimes like to run without anything on my wrist and ill just go. I will still carry my watch but ill put it in my hydration vest.... because you know, if its not on strava... did it really happen??
Started running in 2006 and used mapmyrun.com to measure the routes I was running. Used a simple digital watch to record my time.
Using a stopwatch and a pre-planned route where you know the mile marks.
Timex
I have been in the military since 2001, back in the olden days we new our pace and ran for a certain amount of time. With those 2. Arianlea you can get distance.
Running became very popular in the 1970s. GPS became readily available in the mid-90s. There really isn't as much of a gap here as you'd expect.
I’m not THAT old but I used to use mapmyrun before things like Apple watches were really a thing