Moving time vs elapsed time on a hike
Stop for lunch on a bench, take twenty photos at a viewpoint, or wait out a squall under a tree, and your phone has just recorded two different truths about the same walk: the clock that ran the whole time you were out, and the clock that only ran while you were actually moving. Neither one is wrong. They answer different questions, and most confusion about hiking durations comes from not knowing which one is on screen.
The short answer
Elapsed time is simple: the moment you started recording to the moment you stopped, with nothing subtracted. If you were out from 9:00 to 13:00, elapsed time is four hours, whether you spent forty minutes of that sitting down or not.
Moving time is elapsed time with the stopped stretches taken out. Same walk, same 9:00 to 13:00, but if forty minutes of that was a lunch stop, moving time reports three hours twenty. Both numbers describe one walk. They are just answering "how long was I out" versus "how long was I actually walking."
How an app decides you have stopped
There are two different ways this gets decided, and they behave differently at the edges.
Automatic detection
Some apps watch your GPS speed and treat anything below a small threshold as stationary, subtracting it from moving time without you doing anything. This is convenient, but a threshold is a guess: stand still on a spot with a noisy GPS fix and the reported speed can jitter above the threshold even though you have not moved, quietly padding moving time. Move very slowly over rough ground and the opposite can happen — real walking gets misread as a stop.
Manual pause
The other approach is a pause button you press yourself. It takes a deliberate tap, but it is exact: the app has no doubt about when you stopped and when you started again, because you told it.
Why pace depends on which one you use
Pace is distance divided by time, so it inherits whichever duration went into the calculation. A five-kilometre walk with a thirty-minute lunch stop gives a very different pace depending on whether that thirty minutes is counted. Divide by elapsed time and the lunch stop drags your average down; divide by moving time and it disappears from the number entirely, because moving time was built specifically to exclude it. Neither pace is more "correct" — they are answers to different questions — but a pace figure is close to meaningless unless you know which duration produced it.
Why two apps disagree about the same walk
Upload the same recorded route to two different services and it is common for the reported duration, and therefore the pace, to come apart, for reasons that have nothing to do with either app being broken.
- One app auto-detects stops, the other relies on a manual pause you did or did not press.
- Auto-detection thresholds differ between services, so the same noisy patch of GPS near a stop gets classified differently.
- A recalculating service may re-derive moving time from the raw points in the file rather than trusting the summary the recording app already computed.
- A short stop below whatever a service treats as "worth counting" gets rounded away entirely by one app and kept by another.
Elapsed time is the one figure that should always match, since it is nothing more than a start and an end timestamp. If elapsed time disagrees between two apps looking at the same file, that points to a timezone or a data problem rather than a stop-detection difference.
What TrailCam does
TrailCam reports duration as moving time, with pauses kept out of it. Recording pauses and resumes when you tap to pause it — paused time stays out of your moving time, and the route keeps recording in the background the rest of the time, whether the screen is off or you have switched to another app. There is no automatic stop-detection guessing at your speed; the app records what you tell it.
Questions
- Does elapsed time include a lunch break?
- Yes, unless the walk was paused for it. Elapsed time is simply the time from start to finish with nothing subtracted, so any stop that was not explicitly paused stays inside it.
- Why is my pace faster in one app than another for the exact same hike?
- Almost always because the two apps used different durations to calculate it — one counted a stop that the other subtracted, or they detect stops differently. Check whether each pace was calculated from moving time or elapsed time before comparing them.
- Should I look at moving time or elapsed time to know how long a hike really took?
- Elapsed time answers how long you were out; moving time answers how long you were walking. For planning when you will be back, elapsed time matters more. For judging your walking pace on the trail, moving time is the honest number.
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.