The local government broke time.
I may have mentioned this in a previous post, but I live in a small city on the Canadian prairies. For decades we’ve participated in the global time swap game that is otherwise known as Daylight Savings Time. But earlier this year the provincial government announced they were pulling the plug on the twice-annual clock change dance. And as Halloween came to a close and we welcomed November we collectively crossed our fingers and assumed everything was sorted out.
What you may not know about that GPS watch you have strapped to your arm while you run is that it is a marvel of technological accuracy. It uses precisely configured clocks orbiting the planet that transmit a steady signal of time stamps. Your watch triangulates as many of these signals as it can see in the sky and the subtle differences in time between them—millionths of a second, perhaps—allows it to math out where you are to within a few meters.
In other words, time is a pretty important aspect of how they work. And since your watch is forever receiving precisely tuned time updates from space, it tends to take that as a trusted way to set the time on your watch… provided everything is tuned correctly.
And usually, if you’re just trying to get in a nice morning run, you don’t need to think about that or even care. It should just work.
At the risk of getting slightly political, that aforementioned government apparently did a pretty terrible job of making sure all the people who needed to know that we had collectively bowed out of the Daylight Savings were aware of our plan.
I woke up Sunday morning and my watch was off by an hour.
I ran Sunday morning and my activity time was off by an hour.
I forced my watch to the right time through the Garmin app. A few minutes later, my watch was off by an hour.
I set the watch to “phone sync” mode and went to the right time, but then I went for an afternoon walk and… yeah, my watch was off by an hour afterwards.
It’s a small thing, sure. But it’s also my watch.
I sent a support ticket to Garmin. Hopefully they have a better plan than the government to deal with this.
Definitions
- Canadian
- I write this blog from a small city in the middle of the Canadian prairies. It means I use terms like kilometres and celsius and you're just gonna need to deal with that. I run four seasons long, from blisteringly hot summers through icy cold winters. I've encountered moose, beavers, and snakes on our trails. And we're proud of it all.
- gps watch
- This is not an endorsement for any particular brand or model. I'm a Garmin guy myself, but owning a dedicated watch that tracks all your running metrics is pretty much standard fare as a modern day runner.
