Field notes 4 MIN READ
Moving time or elapsed time on a print
One of them is the answer you give people. The other is what the day actually took. They are rarely the same and the gap is the interesting part.
Every activity carries two durations, and the difference between them is often the whole character of the day.
What they measure
Elapsed time runs from start to finish. Everything is in it: the punctures, the café, the twenty minutes spent waiting for the ferry, the argument about which way to go.
Moving time excludes the parts where you were not moving. The device decides what counts as stopped, usually by a speed threshold.
On a 200 km day these can differ by hours.
Which is more honest
Both, about different things.
Moving time is a fair basis for pace. Elapsed time divided by distance would say you climbed badly when in fact you had a long lunch.
Elapsed time is a fair account of the day. If somebody asks how long the ride took, and the answer that comes out is the moving time, that answer quietly deletes three punctures and two hours of rain.
What we would put on the paper
Elapsed, in most cases.
A print is not a performance record. Nobody is going to compare the number on your wall to anyone else's. What it does is give the day a size, and the size of that day includes the stops.
There is one exception. For a race, print the official time. Not moving, not elapsed, not what your watch said — the time on the results page, gun or chip as you prefer. That is the number the day was about, and it is the only one anybody else can verify.
Both are available
The configurator offers elapsed by default and moving time as an option, and you can rename either label to whatever you would call it. The values themselves come from the file and are not editable, which is the point: the numbers are evidence, and the words around them are yours.
Questions people actually ask
- What is the difference?
- Elapsed is start to finish including every stop. Moving time excludes the periods where you were stationary, according to a threshold in the recording device.
- Which is on my Strava profile?
- Both, but moving time is the one used for pace, so it is the number most people quote.
- Which should go on a print?
- Elapsed, usually. A print is a record of a day rather than a performance, and the two hours in a café are part of what happened.
- Why do they match on a race?
- Because you did not stop. In a race the two converge, which is why race times feel unambiguous and training rides do not.
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