To Pause or Not to Pause

The Case For Pausing

The most obvious argument for pausing your watch is accuracy. If your goal is to know your true running pace, how fast your legs actually move when they're moving — then stopping the clock at a red light makes perfect sense.

As noted by fitness platform Advnture, the main advantage of pausing your watch at traffic lights is that you get a more accurate reflection of your time and pace. If you're training to hit a specific split or chasing a personal best on a city route riddled with crossings, those 30–60 second stops can meaningfully skew your average pace.

SportTracks also points out a compelling training-specific reason: if your workout calls for you to maintain a specific pace or speed, stopping will drag your speed and pace data down unnecessarily — and using the Pause button avoids that distortion. This is especially relevant for structured interval or tempo runs where precise pacing data is the whole point.

The Case Against Pausing

Here's where it gets interesting. If you care about training load and recovery data rather than just pace, pausing might actually be hurting the quality of your data.

"Rest periods — whether waiting at a traffic light or taking a quick break are crucial data points that show us how your body recovers mid-run. When you pause your device, it stops recording data entirely. This creates an incomplete file that doesn't reflect the true physical demands of your run." — TrainAsONE

In other words, your heart rate response at a crossing, whether it spikes or recovers quickly, is genuinely useful physiological information. Pausing throws that data away.

There's also a GPS accuracy issue to consider. As trail runners on the EmigranTrailer forum have noted, pausing and then resuming means the GPS may need a few seconds to re-lock onto satellite signals. This can create drift in your distance and pace measurements, ironically making your data less accurate, not more, especially on routes with many intersections.

The Forgetting-to-Unpause Problem

Ask any runner and they'll have a story. You pause at a light, start chatting, tighten a lace, zone out — and half a kilometre later you glance down to find your watch still frozen. SportTracks calls this one of the biggest downsides: forgetting to resume a workout after pausing is definitely something to be avoided at all costs.

Stylist's Strong Women running column echoes this with hard-earned wisdom: pausing creates a risk of a lot going wrong, poor GPS re-connection, low battery drains, forgetting to stop or start at the right moment. All of these can undermine the very accuracy you were trying to protect.

What About Auto-Pause?

Many modern GPS watches such as Garmin, Apple Watch, Suunto and others offer an auto-pause feature that detects when you stop moving and pauses the timer automatically, then resumes when you start running again. This sounds like the best of both worlds, but it comes with its own quirks.

Apple Watch users on the Apple Community forums have reported that after auto-pausing at traffic lights, GPS tracking can lag by a few seconds on resumption — enough to cause measurable drift in distance over a run with many crossings.

Wareable found auto-pause generally accurate for road running, noting that runners receive a light vibration when the watch detects they've stopped. They did, however, recommend turning auto-pause off for interval-style training where brief stops are part of the workout structure.

So, What Should You Actually Do?

There's no universal right answer, but here's a practical framework:

The Bigger Picture

At the end of the day, a red light is a red light. It's part of urban running life, and no amount of watch-fiddling changes the fact that your legs stopped. The number on your screen is only one signal among many — perceived effort, sleep quality, nutrition, and consistency all matter far more to your long-term progress than whether your average kilometre pace includes a 45-second wait at a crossing.

Run the way that keeps you motivated. If pausing helps you lace up tomorrow morning, pause away. If you're the kind of runner who finds meaning in the messy, unedited truth of a city run — red lights and all — then let it run.