Average pace vs current pace on a hike
Hear your pace called out partway up a climb and it can sound alarmingly slow. Check the pace shown once you are back and it often reads better than that single moment suggested. Neither number is lying â they are built from different amounts of the same walk, one from a short stretch happening right now and one from the whole route added together, and there is no reason to expect a snapshot and a summary to match.
The short answer
Current pace is a live estimate, worked out from however far and how fast you have moved over the last few seconds. Average pace is calculated once the walk is over, or once enough of it has happened, from total distance divided by total moving time. One is a narrow window; the other is everything added together. A single tough stretch can swing the narrow window hard while barely nudging a total built from an entire hike.
How current pace is worked out
GPS gives a phone your position, not your speed â speed has to be worked out afterwards by comparing recent positions and the time between them. A live pace figure comes from just that: the last handful of seconds of movement, turned into a rate. That short window is what makes it useful for an in-the-moment update, and also what makes it jumpy. A rocky step, a pause to look at a view, or a few strides on a narrow switchback all show up immediately in a number built from so little data, because there is nothing else in the window to smooth it out.
This is the same reason a spoken pace announcement mid-climb can sound worse than the walk actually felt. It is reporting exactly what the last few seconds looked like, not the shape of the last hour.
How average pace is worked out
Average pace looks at the walk as a whole rather than a moment inside it: total distance covered, divided by total moving time. Every fast stretch and every slow stretch goes into the same sum, so a two-minute scramble that felt brutal in the moment only ever contributes two minutes' worth of weight to a number built from a two-hour walk. The steep bit is still in there â it is just no longer the only thing the number is describing.
Why the two rarely agree at any single instant
Current pace and average pace are honest answers to two different questions â "how fast right now" and "how fast overall" â so treating them as the same measurement is where the confusion starts. A climb can make the live number spike for as long as the climb lasts, and then settle back down once the ground evens out, while the average barely reacts because it is diluting that stretch across everything that came before it. The reverse happens too: a long, easy, flat section can quietly pull the average toward a pace faster than almost anyone remembers hearing announced at any specific point along the way, simply because a flat stretch rarely gets a mid-walk mention â it is the climbs and the stops that prompt someone to check.
Neither number needs correcting for this. A live pace that looks rough on a hard pitch and an average that looks better than the hard pitch felt are both doing exactly what they are built to do.
Things that trip people up
- Judging a whole hike by one spoken pace update from the steepest part of it â that number was only ever describing the last few seconds, not the walk overall.
- Assuming a rough current-pace reading means the average will look the same once the route is done â a short hard stretch has far less influence on a total than it feels like in the moment.
- Expecting current pace to hold steady the way average pace does â it is built from a short window on purpose, so it is supposed to move around as the ground underfoot changes.
- Comparing a current-pace figure from one hike against an average-pace figure from another â they answer different questions, so lining them up side by side does not tell you much.
Where TrailCam fits in
TrailCam can speak your distance and pace aloud as you go, so you get a live update without checking the screen, and it reports pace for the finished route as an overall figure once you are done, built from moving time with paused stretches kept out of it. They are two different readings of the same walk on purpose â one for keeping an ear on things mid-hike, one for looking back on the whole route afterwards. TrailCam is free to download.
Questions
- Is current pace less accurate than average pace?
- Not less accurate, just answering a narrower question. Current pace reports a short recent stretch, so it reacts quickly and moves around a lot; average pace reports the whole walk, so it stays steadier. Both are correct readings of what they are actually measuring.
- Why did my spoken pace sound much slower than the pace shown at the end?
- A spoken update mid-hike is usually describing a short recent window, which picks up whatever you were doing right then â climbing, picking through loose rock, stopped for a view. The final figure averages that stretch in with the rest of the walk, so one hard patch rarely moves it as much as it felt like it should.
- Does a short pause affect average pace the way it affects current pace?
- Paused time is left out of average pace entirely, since it is calculated from moving time. Current pace is only ever looking at recent movement anyway, so a pause simply means there is nothing new to report until you start moving again.
Recording your own routes
TrailCam is an iPhone app that records your route with GPS, keeps video clips, photos and voice notes pinned to the spot where you took them, and exports the result as GPX 1.1 or CSV. It is free to download.