All features / Recording
Smart Pause.
GPS never stops.
Auto-pause was supposed to make recording easier. Instead it killed your climb, forgot to resume at the aid station, and shaved three of your best miles off your stats. PeakPulse is built so that can't happen.
The flaw in every other recorder
When a typical run tracker pauses — manually or automatically — it stops listening to GPS. The clock stops. The track stops. The pace freezes. And when you come back hours later to look at your effort, those gaps are simply gone. You can't get them back.
Auto-pause sounds clever until you climb a real mountain. Switchbacks at walking pace? "You stopped." A queue at a creek crossing? "You stopped." A two-minute photo break above tree line? "You stopped — and we forgot to start again." The algorithm doesn't know you. It pattern-matches your speed against a flat-road heuristic and quietly throws data away.
The worst part isn't the bad math. It's that you can't tell when it happened. The only evidence is a flat line on a map and an elevation profile that looks suspiciously short.
The GPS chip in your watch and phone doesn't get tired. The only reason recording stops is because software told it to.
How Smart Pause works
PeakPulse separates two ideas that everyone else fuses: your effort and your track. Pause only affects effort. Your track keeps going.
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01
The GPS recorder is always on
From the moment you tap Start until you tap Finish, every GPS sample lands on disk. Phone or watch. Tunnel, canopy, basement parking lot — whatever the chip sees, we save. Storage is cheap; lost mileage isn't.
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02
Pause is a timestamped marker
When you (or auto-pause) trigger a pause, PeakPulse drops a "pause start" marker on the track. When you resume, it drops a "pause end" marker. That's it. The underlying GPS log doesn't care.
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03
Stats respect the markers
Live stats — moving time, average pace, distance — calculate from your effort. Paused segments don't pollute your splits. The numbers you watch mid-effort are still honest.
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04
After the workout, fix anything
Open the run, see every pause on a timeline. False pause on a switchback? Delete it — the GPS data underneath is already there. Forgot to resume after the aid station? Trim the pause back to where you actually started running. The mileage was never gone.
Smarter auto-pause too
If you do want automatic pause detection, ours uses more than just speed.
Why this matters on long days
The longer the effort, the more pauses accumulate. A six-hour ride has aid stations, photo stops, mechanicals, and bonk recoveries. A backcountry run has stream crossings, route-finding stops, and the inevitable moment you forget you ever pressed pause. With other apps each of those events is a potential data crime scene — gaps you have to either accept or manually reconstruct from memory.
PeakPulse just records everything. When you look at the workout afterward, you have a complete ground-truth track plus a layer of pause markers on top. Adjust the markers. The underlying data never moves.
Common questions
Does this drain my battery faster?
Slightly. The GPS chip stays on during paused segments instead of being put to sleep. In practice the cost is small — modern GPS chips are designed for continuous use, and PeakPulse tunes sample rate based on movement. For a typical four-hour trail run on iPhone, the overhead is well under five percent of total battery used.
If you're truly worried about battery (multi-day adventures, expeditions), PeakPulse has a Long Effort mode that drops sample rate during long stationary periods — without ever dropping samples to zero.
Can I still use manual pause?
Yes. The pause button on iPhone, Watch, and Action Button all work like you'd expect. The only difference is that under the hood, your pause becomes a marker — not a data void. You can still resume manually and your moving stats will reflect the time you were paused.
What happens if my phone runs out of battery mid-workout?
The recording is checkpointed continuously, so whatever was captured up to the point of shutdown is safe. When you charge and reopen, PeakPulse will offer to recover the in-progress workout. If you were also recording on Apple Watch, the watch recording continues independently and can be used as the authoritative track when you sync.
How does this compare to Strava's auto-pause?
Strava (and most other trackers) treat pause as a data boundary — the recording stops and the moving-time calculation kicks in. That's fine for road running where stoplights are predictable. On trail, where "stopped" is ambiguous and the algorithm is wrong often, you lose data you can't get back. PeakPulse uses the same moving-time concept for stats but keeps the GPS log intact, so a wrong call by the algorithm is a fixable annotation rather than a permanent gap.
If I upload to Strava, does Strava see the paused segments?
You choose. By default, PeakPulse exports the same shape Strava expects: a track with moving time correctly excluded for paused segments. If you've fixed false pauses in the editor first, those repairs are reflected in the upload. Your Strava stats will match what PeakPulse shows.