Solved my Polar S1 Footpod problem

First off, sorry for not updating for about a week. It had been a very very busy week with projects and doing 8-5 in the school project center. That took quite alot of time away from blogging, or just say I’ve not actually got into the regular habit or doing it with this new timetable, despite being in front of the computer working most of the time.

Nevertheless, in response to the various “OMG is Polar really that bad?” queries, apparently, it seems that the problems in distance measures seem to go away when I wear the footpod on my left foot. Largely yet strangely, I think it had something to do with how to fasten the footpod onto the shoe – as you know shoelaces tend to concave on top of your foot, it makes some kind of a semi circular “slider rail” which can cause the footpod to slide slanted to either side from the top center position, and since the footpod is a G-accelerometer device when that happens, there goes your distance measurements.

You can’t deny that there will be a variation each time you clip the footpod on, not to mention over the shoes you rotate for running, as it won’t sit in the exalt same position every time. The trick is to get to footpod to be locked into as many laces as possible, as far up front, so it will stay snuggly where it should be – on the top and center of your shoe, with that, you can minimise the errors you get from position variations. Of course this error won’t be as much as choosing to cut more corners in your route, it can be actually neglected. I tried it on separate runs without removing the footpod from my shoe at all and the distances vary about 1%, adjust the positions and the variations increase by up to 2%.

Of course there may be some other factors causing your footpod not to swing in a straight line, such as gait over/under pronation but often yield a slight 2-3% of the actual distance (that is where the footpod calibration factor comes into play).

All my runs now are at 1.000 calibration factor and distances are about 0.97% off the satelite distances I run. Not bad, wold be keeping more in the loop on future runs.

Woot, crossed the 800km mark for this year! 200km more to go for 1000km!