How to hear your distance and pace during a hike

The short answer

Turn on voice or spoken announcements if the app you are using offers them, and let the recording run with the screen off. A tracking app that has been granted background location access can keep working from inside a pocket for the whole walk, and the same background access is what lets it speak a distance or pace update out loud at the moments you choose, rather than only ever showing the number on a screen you have to go looking for.

TrailCam can speak distance and pace aloud as you go, in whichever language you have set, on top of recording with the screen off — the two are built to be used together rather than as separate settings you have to remember to combine.

Why checking the screen costs more than it looks like

Pulling a phone out mid-stride costs three things at once, and none of them show up in any log afterward. It breaks your footing rhythm on ground that is already doing most of the work of tripping you up. It puts a bright rectangle in front of eyes that were adjusted to whatever the trail actually looks like, which takes a few seconds to recover from once the phone goes away again. And it wakes the display, which is by a wide margin the single largest drain on battery during a tracked walk — waking the screen once to check a number can cost more than several minutes of the GPS receiver running quietly on its own.

None of that is a reason to stop checking your progress. It is a reason to prefer a channel that does not need your eyes or your footing to work.

How a phone turns a number into a sentence

iOS has a built-in system for converting text into spoken audio, the same underlying technology behind turn-by-turn driving directions and the accessibility features that read a screen aloud for someone who cannot see it. Any app is free to use it. A tracking app that wants to speak your pace does not need anything exotic: it computes the number the same way it always does, hands a short sentence to that system voice, and the phone or a connected pair of headphones reads it out in whichever language the device is set to.

This is also why spoken updates cost so little compared with the screen. Speech synthesis for a sentence or two, triggered occasionally, is a brief burst rather than a sustained draw — nothing like a display staying lit while you find and read a number yourself.

What is worth hearing, and what stays on the screen

Distance and pace are naturally suited to being said out loud, because each one collapses to a single number and a unit — three point two kilometres, eleven minutes a kilometre — said in a couple of seconds and understood the same way whether it is read or heard. Elevation gain and a route's shape on the map are a different kind of information; there is no sensible way to compress a climb profile or the bend of a trail into a sentence, so those stay visual, something to look at once you are somewhere safe to look. Voice announcements were never meant to replace the screen. They are for the handful of numbers worth knowing without stopping for them.

What TrailCam does

TrailCam records with the screen off or the phone in another app, and can speak distance and pace aloud as you go, in whichever language you have set, so there is rarely a reason to take it out at all during the walk itself. Once you are back, the full route shows pace in kilometres or miles, whichever you prefer, alongside distance, moving time and elevation gain. It is free to download.