Significant distance discrepancy between Google Health/Fitbit (watch display) and Strava: 400m off on a 10k!
Hey everyone,
I’m running into a really frustrating issue with my setup and wanted to see if anyone else is experiencing the same thing or knows a fix.
During my runs, the distance displayed live on my watch (using the native Google Health / Fitbit setup) is consistently underreporting my actual distance. For example, on a 10k run yesterday, the watch showed 10.01 km when I finished. However, once the activity uploaded and synced to Strava, the actual recalculated route distance came out to 10.38 km!
That’s nearly a 400-meter difference over a 10k, which completely ruins the live pacing metrics during the run. The watch is showing a much slower pace in real-time than what I’m actually running, making it really hard to properly manage my effort.
It seems like the watch app uses aggressive smoothing or relies too heavily on wrist stride estimation in real-time to save battery, whereas Strava recalculates the raw GPS track afterwards.
Is there any setting within Google Health/Fitbit to improve live GPS tracking accuracy, or are we just stuck with bad real-time metrics until post-sync?
(My smartwatch is Pixel Watch 3)