You set your sights on a badge. You put in the work. You sync your run. But instead of the joy and satisfaction of a badge well earned you get nadda - zip -zilch. What’s the deal?
General
All badges are earned from the date of registration. If you’ve added old runs they don’t count. I know. It’s stupid to earn a 1 mile badge when you’re an ultra runner. But there’s a couple good reasons for this lunacy.
First, we only have so many badges, and if you earn them all the day you register then there’s no fun and no challenge. Second, if someone can just register an account drop a huge zip file onto our servers, earn 80+ badges and then walk away then there’s no sense of exclusivity. Some Smashrun badges are really hard some badges can take an entire year, the people who earned them worked their butt off, and a big part of the incentive is knowing you were one of the very, very few who pulled it off.
- Confirm that all the required runs occurred after your registration date. This can get tricky if it’s a badge that’s dependent on a monthly total and you registered mid-month. You can check your registration date by hovering over your name and opening the user “quick view”
Specific Badges
Foreign Legion
The Foreign Legion badge requires that you run a 2800m Cooper Test. This is tough. It’s not age or sex graded, so it can be an incredible challenge. You don’t want to give everything you got and then get hung up on a detail.
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The run must have no pauses
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It must be at least 2800 meters long and 12 minutes long or under. If you finish 2800m and decide to stop before 12 minutes then it’ll count, but if you run for more than a second or two longer than 12 minutes it won’t.
Steady Badges
Tip 1
Run fast. Pace variability is the average percentage difference of the speed of every point from the average of the whole run. Since it’s a percentage the faster you run the easier it is to keep it low. For example if you’re walking at 4k/h and you speed up to 5k/h that’s a 25% increase, but if you’re running 10k/h and speed up to 11k/h that’s only a 10% increase.
Tip 2
Run flat. For obvious reasons.
Tip 3
Run straight. A track would be ideal except GPS screws up more on curves, with a good watch it’s not a lot, but it’s enough. Find a nice straight flat route.
Tip 4
Use a cadence sensor. I’m pretty sure (nearly quite possibly sure) that Garmin uses the cadence data along with the GPS to improve the speed calculation. We use the distance (equivalent to speed) from Garmin rather than calculating it.