New step counter

My cheap little step counter died a long time ago. I had been carrying around my heavy phone when going on walks or runs, and thinking I needed something better. Because I've been counting steps for years, I could probably justify spending some money for a fancy fitness tracking watch. And then after a few weeks of eyeballing fancy fitness trackers, there was a weekend half price sale, and I bought one!

Finally. A device meant to watch my fitness for me. It would be so much better and more accurate than my phone or cheap step counter. I immediately took it out into the park to go race walking. In the past, I found that my cheapo step counter, and my phone, were terrible at tracking steps while race walking. Finally with an expensive device I could figure out how far I really went, how many steps I really took. 

But after a long zig-zaggy walk through the park, it only gave me 3000 steps. My phone in my pocket gave me 6000 steps for the same walk. To add to the insult, I came home and it told me it had auto-detected a workout! Good job spending 30 minutes on that elliptical trainer!

So ok. It didn't seem to count steps any better. In fact, it was significantly worse. But no worries -- the fancy fitness tracker came with a built in GPS! I would take it race walking again, but I would turn on the GPS and let it track me all over the park and it would see how fast I was walking and call it a speed walk, not an elliptical trainer.

This time I left the phone home, and just went on the long walk -- me and the tracker. A few minutes in, it buzzed me and let me know it couldn't find a GPS signal, and was turning off. Argh! 

I looked it up, and people online also complained about the poor GPS signal. To really track your workout, you needed to bring along the phone GPS as backup. 

So I did that. I did that too. It mapped out my whole route!

But it still only gave me 2840 steps. 

My phone gave me 4308 steps.

The fitness tracker? You can see that it thinks I went 2.42km. But then I tracked a slow walk later that day:

And it gave me 2.64km for what is clearly a much shorter distance. (It also says I went walking straight through the soccer club buildings and then across the muddy field, so also not so accurate.)

I sat down at the computer, and mapped out the zig zaggy walk carefully. It said the whole walk was 3.2km. From there I could figure out my speed: about 6.4km/hr, or 15 minutes per mile. Long way to go before I reach Olympic race walking levels, but definitely faster than my usual walking speed. Still no idea how many steps, but probably at least as many as the phone gave me.

You would think that the fancy expensive new device could figure that out for me. 

I did a search, and the online race walking community is also disappointed. Faster people than me have had their workout auto-detected as elliptical or even a bike ride. And poor step counting.

Disappointing. But oh well. Maybe I'll just take up a new sport. Like elliptical training.