End botched training data with auto-stop on loop

This morning, when my wife and I took off on our trail run, I started my exercise timer app. A few hours later, we returned to the starting point, got in the car and drove home. Pulling into the garage, as often happens, I realized that once again I’d forgotten to stop the timer at the end of our run.

Yet another set of recorded training data messed up.

Whether it’s Strava or RunKeeper on my iPhone, or my Garmin Forerunner device, this problem happens so often that it got me wondering about possible solutions. Since the great majority of my routes—whether running, hiking or biking—start and stop at the same location, this particular problem could be solved if GPS device and app makers added a simple “looping auto-stop” setting that automatically stopped the timer whenever I returned to my starting point.

So simple, yet effective! I’m going to forward this article to the folks at Garmin and Strava, in hopes they’ll add this feature to their products. And if you like the idea, maybe you can do the same.

(Of course, it’d need to be an optional setting, to allow these devices and apps to be used in multi-lap events.)