My runs have been hillier than they were in Belgium, enough so that I complain about it at times. To quantify hilliness, I have heard this formula on the Inside Running Podcast by host Julian “Moose” Spence. I cannot imagine he is the first one to come up with it, but that is my source at least.

elevation_in_metre / distance_in_km >= 10

Your run is hilly if that one is true. Ran 13 km with 100 metre elevation? 100 / 13 = 7.7. Sorry, that was flat. 150 metre elevation? 11.5, that was hilly. Does this throw out a lot of information? Yes. Is it simpler than alternatives? Also probably yes.

Now the tricky thing here is what source to use for elevation, because depending on elevation data and the smoothing applied that varies a lot. Over the twoish years of using my current Garmin watch, that is the one I default to for this calculation. Presumably Strava is pretty samesy. Note that Strava will use your watch data unless you tell it not to, when it will override with its own elevation data.

Now I wanted to make a little graph here and compare values over time. I have my data already locally in GoldenCheetah, so I glanced at that and… realised I cannot use the elevation data. Before I got my current watch, I believe there was no elevation data added to the activity itself, so GoldenCheetah would fill in those blanks using its own sources. Whatever source it uses or used for that, however, would always give way more elevation gain than Garmin or Strava assigned to an activity. So much so that I had always disregarded it entirely. So data prior to the current watch I cannot use. I left Belgium pretty soon after getting this current watch.

Eyeballing the numbers of the runs in my current location and of the few runs when I visit family, I’d say my feeling of “I have more elevation now” is correct, but I am too lazy to delve much deeper into a proper analysis where I would have to somehow clean up the old data or find a different source.

Why did I feel the need to write out this post then, you may ask? Well, I was not sure about that actual formula any more, so I wanted to write it down. This post will also serve as a reminder for if I feel like checking out that difference in hilliness again: probably not worth the effort, future me.