GpxFix Blog

How to Change the Distance of a Workout

By Roy Lachica on August 02, 2025. Last updated August 2, 2025.

Here's a practical guide on why you might adjust distance, how to do it responsibly, and when editing crosses the line into cheating or misleading reporting.

Why change the distance?

There are legitimate, practical reasons to correct the distance captured by your sports watch or other device:

• GPS errors: Urban canyons, tree cover, tunnels or a temporary loss of satellite lock can make your watch under- or over-count distance.
• Incorrect sensor calibration: For footpods, bike sensors or treadmill mode, a miscalibrated stride length or wheel circumference can skew the recorded distance.
• Improper device settings: Your device is in a low-power mode or the activity is set to Hiking, which only records your position every ~5 seconds. This can cause the tracked distance to appear shorter, since small turns and movements aren’t captured between recording points..

How to change distance responsibly

1. Check raw data first: Look at the GPS track map and elevation traces. That helps you decide whether a distance tweak is justified or whether the activity should be deleted and re-recorded.
2. Decide how much to add or remove: Decide a value to add or remove that will not be unrealistic.
3. Document the edit: Many apps let you add notes. Add a short reason (e.g., “GPS spike corrected” or “footpod calibration updated”) so your training history stays transparent.

When you should not change the distance

There are important ethical and practical limits to editing recorded workouts. Avoid changing distance in the following situations:

• Competitive events and official results: Never edit distance or times for races or events where official results matter. Altering those records is usually against race rules and can be considered fraud.
• Virtual challenges with rewards: If the platform offers prizes, leaderboards, or qualification spots, editing to gain advantage is dishonest and often violates terms of service.
• Insurance, medical, or contractual reporting: If the activity data is used to support a claim, medical advice, or contractual obligation, edits can have legal or financial consequences.
• To conceal inactivity: Don’t alter workouts to make your training look more consistent or intense than it actually was, it undermines the purpose of a training log and misleads coaches or teammates.

Examples — good edits and bad edits

Good: You ran a 10 km route you know is exactly 10k but GPS tracking was inaccurate and only logged 9.9 km. You increase the distance by 100 m, note “GPS spike corrected,” and accept the corrected pace.

Bad: You rode 40 km but want to hit a 50 km virtual challenge target — you manually add 10 km to the ride to gain a badge. That’s dishonest and would violate GpxFix terms of use.

Alternatives to editing distance

• Delete and retry: If the workout is clearly wrong (long GPS detours or truncated tracks), deleting and re-recording a planned route later avoids fudging the log.
• Post notes: If small discrepancies don’t materially affect your training, leave the activity as-is and annotate it — that keeps data honest for coaches and future analysis.

Quick checklist before you edit

• Is this a training log only, or will the data be used for competition/rewards?
• Can the error be fixed by trimming (crop/cut) or using the other correction tools?
• Will changing distance distort derived metrics (pace, power, splits) in a misleading way?
• Have you documented the change with a short note?

How GpxFix actually change the distance

There is no way to magically make a recorded GPS track seem longer. Given a start and end point, all we can do is to change the individual track points to make the total distance longer or shorter. This is actually what we do in GpxFix when you use the 'Change Distance' feature. When adding distance we simply make your track zig zag slightly to add more distance. If you are removing distance we make the track straighter to reduce the distance. The changes are very small especcially for longer workouts and usually not very visible on the map, but they do affect the total distance.

Final thoughts

Editing the distance of a recorded workout can be a useful repair for sensor glitches and life’s little detours. The key is to act in good faith: correct obvious errors, keep edits modest, and be transparent when the data might be viewed by others, coaches, or competition platforms. When in doubt, don’t alter competitive or official results — instead, use notes, platform tools, or re-record the activity.