Strava Time vs Chip Time: No, Mine Doesn't Count, And Neither Does Yours
- 10 hours ago
- 6 min read
Let me tell you about the quiet civil war happening in my race photos.
On one side: the timing chip. Sometimes a humble little tag laced into my shoe; other times one of those chunky velcro bands strapped around my ankle, the kind that makes me look less "club runner chasing a PB" and more "category-one prisoner who's cut the tag and legged it from an open prison." Either way, it records cold, indifferent truth. It has never once tried to make me feel good about myself.
On the other side: Strava, my loyal hype-man, leaning over my shoulder after every race whispering, "Mate. You went sub-three. Honestly. I saw it."
I did not go sub-three. Strava is lying to me. And the worst part is I want to believe it.
I've been following the whole Strava-versus-chip-time saga on Instagram for a while now, and there are so many posts taking aim at the influencers. Let's just call them what they are: Run Cheats. I've even seen people holding up banners about them at actual races, which I'm sure is also there for the laughs and the likes, because apparently nothing in this sport happens anymore unless it's content.
But let's be real for a second. Running is hard. There is no shame in missing your A goal, or in not setting a PB on every single run. None. That's unless you're the kind of person who documents your entire life online through the lens of being slightly ridiculous, because that's how people engage, isn't it. And yes, you, I expect, are the same lot who follow me on Instagram, then unfollow me a day later. Hours, in some cases. I see you. I have you in my sights. This is not a fake popularity contest, and I am not pretending it is.
Right. Now that's off my chest, let's get into Strava vs chip time.
The two clocks that hate each other
Here's the difference, stripped of theatrics. Chip time runs from the moment I cross the start mat to the moment I cross the finish mat. It's the only number that counts for a PB or a qualifying time: Boston, London good-for-age, all of it. It does not care about my feelings.
Strava time is a different animal entirely. It starts when my thumb hits Go and stops when I hit Save, measuring duration by elapsed time and distance by GPS. The catch is that Strava only knows the distance my watch recorded. So the instant my watch ticks over 21.1K (13.1 miles), Strava cheerfully serves me a half-marathon split, completely indifferent to where the actual finish line lives.
And in basically every road race I've ever run, the watch reads long.
Why my watch is lying to me (sort of)
Two culprits, neither of them a cover-up.
I didn't run the tangents. Courses are certified along the shortest legal line, the straightest possible path through every bend. I, a mortal weaving around slower runners, hurdling discarded gel sachets and swinging wide for every water station, am not running that line. On a twisty city marathon, watches routinely come back at 26.3 to 26.45 miles (42.3 to 42.7 km) instead of the official 26.2 (42.2 km). More turns, more crowds, more bonus distance I never asked for.
GPS drift. Even a good watch jitters. It stitches my route together from slightly wobbly dots, and connecting wobbly dots makes a longer line than I actually ran. The error can be big enough that the watch announces the marathon finish while the real line is still over 400m, a quarter of a mile, up the road. My advice, which I refuse to take myself: give the GPS a 1% margin and stop arguing with it.
The truth is right there. I just won't look at it.
Here's the thing nobody wants to say out loud: if I didn't run a sub-three, does it actually matter? The chip says I didn't. Fine. That's not a tragedy, it's a training plan. It's a reason to go back out next block and earn the real one, the one that survives the email the morning after.
But we don't live in that world anymore, do we. We live in a world where cheating isn't the exception, it's the ambient setting. Walk into any gym this week and you'll watch someone arrive with a phone, a tripod, a ring light and a sense of destiny, hoist a single dumbbell roughly three feet into the air, deploy a pained-but-sexy grimace, post it, and leave. Total time under tension: zero. Total time on the premises: five minutes. The lift was never the point. The post was the point.
So why is the truth so hard to accept? Because everyone's feed is a highlight reel filmed by a publicist, and reality, the 3:00:46, the chip time, the actual finish line, looks shabby by comparison.
The professionals are worse than me, and that's comforting
If you think I'm being dramatic, consider the ultra world, where this has gone fully feral. We've watched high-profile, supposedly elite runners post heroic times, only for someone to actually open the GPS file and notice they'd been travelling at over 60 mph for several glorious kilometres. Turns out the "trail" had a sunroof. They only got out of the car when the splits got analysed. Imagine training for years to be undone by the laws of physics and one nosy data nerd with a spreadsheet.
So no, I don't feel especially guilty about my thumb hovering over the pause button.
When it is OK to pause my Strava
Because Strava is the one version of the race I get to edit, the pause button is my single sacred lever of narrative control. There is a legal code. I mostly follow it.
Sanctioned pauses. Stopped at a level crossing or red light, I am legally obliged, Your Honour. Genuine shoelace malfunction. The portaloo, obviously. These are acts of God.
The grey zone. "Tactical hydration" that somehow lasts ninety seconds. Stopping to photograph a heron. "Stretching" at the precise base of a hill, purely coincidentally, while my heart rate quietly returns from orbit.
War crimes. Pausing on the climbs to protect my average pace. The silent stop-the-clock at the bottom of every incline. Un-pausing only once I'm moving fast again so the splits read like I'm being chased.
Am I tempted to hit pause on a brutal uphill section of the Tour du Mont Blanc? Damn right I am. Honestly, why stop there. I might just take a helicopter to the single hardest part of the course, throw a bottle of water over my face, fire off a selfie tagged #hardestever #wreckedlegs #nofilter, climb back in, and be sipping an iced tea in the centre of town within ten minutes. Suffering optional. Caption mandatory.
(Watch my Instagram this August. I'll be back in Chamonix for UTMB week. The legs in those photos will look destroyed. Draw your own conclusions.)
The chip doesn't lie. Strava just lets me choose the lighting. And the gym guy with the tripod? He never even picked the weight back up.
About the author
Andy Hood is an ultra and endurance runner, cancer survivor and Runna ambassador who, despite everything written above, will in fact be running every single horrible step of his trails around Chamonix this August during UTMB week, helicopter sadly not included. He's circled Mont Blanc on foot twice (the Tour du Mont Blanc, 2023 and 2025), run 170 miles to Land's End along the South West Coast Path, and designed his own gloriously daft charity ultras, including a 50K on a treadmill in a shopping centre and a Krispy Kreme-fuelled London ultra. Through it all he's raised over £27,000 for cancer charities and launched Check Ya Balls, a cheeky men's underwear brand with a serious message about checking for testicular cancer.
When he's not weaving around slower runners and quietly cursing the tangents, he writes about the gap between what the watch says and what actually happened. The chip time is always worse. The training continues regardless. Follow the suffering, mostly real, over at @runningwestwardho, and if you're the follow-then-unfollow type, you can keep scrolling on by. Thanks.
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