Pacing Distances

Pacing

Figuring Pace Length

• Accurately measure a distance - using a 100 yard (300 feet) football field is perfect.
• Walk the length of the field, counting each time your right foot steps down. Or, just your left foot if you prefer.
• Divide 300 feet by the number of paces you took and that is your pace length.
• It is a good idea to repeat this in the other direction and take an average.

Now that you know your pace length, you can estimate how far you hike. As you hike along, keep track of your paces. At any time, you can multiply your paces by your pace length to figure how far you've travelled.

But, here's why I personally don't find it very useful:

• Going uphill, downhill, across hill, through deep grass, over sand, through brush, over rocks all have an effect on shortening your pace.
• Wearing a backpack shortens your pace.
• Losing count of your paces means you go back and start over or guess and start again from your current spot.
• I'm in the wild to enjoy the wild, not count my steps.
• With my map and compass, I know where I'm going and about how far I have to go. I don't need to pace.

So, pacing is useful for competitions, for learning about how your body covers ground, and for doing specific distance estimating. It also may be useful if you ever become lost and have also lost your compass and map. In that case, you can estimate directions and then track how far you travel.

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Comments:
 Oct 16, 2016 - Hame

Pacing: ideally referenced on a 100m stretch of flat but representative ground when carrying a full pack, then remember you will shorten your pace uphill and lengthen downhill.  Record both tracks and open country.  We used it in the Army for night nav without NVGs and an old school golf stroke counter for paces was the best. [Rosary beads also work]. Good for when you can't see much [fog, blizzard, cloud in the high country etc] or are in featureless terrain without a reliable reference on the horizon.  In the Iraq wars the ground was so flat the maps may as well have been a sheet of sandpaper.  Navigation was done like at sea; distance and direction travelled from a start point checking with the sun at noon and the stars at night.  No currents/significant winds makes it easier unlike what our maritime and aviation colleagues face.

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Mar 20, 2017 - CaptanAJ

I agree with Hame. Although not practical/essential with all land nav applications (nowadays, I rarely find myself using, or even needing a pace count with the majority of back country stuff I do for fun), pacing was extremely useful and necessary for tackling some military land navigation applications, especially when dealing with low visibility, limited to no points of reference/terrain features, etc., as previously mentioned. Also, using a pace counter (a.k.a. "Ranger Beads"), small stones, or other means for keeping tabs on paces/distance covered meant that losing your pacing count was pretty much a non-issue.

To the author's point, pace counting is probably not something most will use, nor even need to worry about based most general back country map and compass hiking-around applications. But, nonetheless, if you understand and can effectively use pacing, that's just one more nugget of knowledge and skill you'll have under your belt should you ever need to rely on it.

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Jun 11, 2018 - Kirby Spencer

I have used it in flat country with low visibility.  But the more practical application is to know when you have overshot a backstop.   If you have triangulated a position on a map, and know that a N/S road is one half mile east, and you pace off 0.6 miles and you have still not hit the road, you probably have mis-identified one or more of your landmarks and/or laid it down on the map incorrectly.

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Apr 26, 2019 - Brent Ward

I am new to orienteering, but myself and a team used pace counting to find controls on a permanent orienteering trail yesterday.

That was the hardest part -- finding the control after we hit our attack point/nearby landmark. It was particularly hard when the control was in non-descript forest.

I found pace counting was good over short distances to help us narrow the search area for the control. But I found it was pretty inaccurate over distances of about 60 to 90 paces.   Probably because we measured our stride on pavement and then used the stride measurement in underbrush and rougher terrain.

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Aug 16, 2019 - S

I have successfully used pacing to find a geocache that was 30 metres away from a known starting point (a particular tree along side the trail that i predicted i would be able to find) in a wooded area, without a GPS and with only a hand drawn map that i'd copied from google maps. closer to home, I use it to answer questions like which bus stop is nearer to my home or which is the shortest route to the laundromat.

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