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Your most accurate Watch ?

Most of us runners possess at least one if not two watches. Well I own two a polar RX3000 which I use for Heart Rate Training/Monitoring and Soleus GPS for measure new training routes and pacing. To my surprise I now own Three, my body/mind.
After finishing Craughwell I had completed 6 Months of Base building long runs with some Lactate Tempo Runs Thrown in here and there, loosely structured around Hadd Training. With Seville approaching before Christmas I switched to the Race Prep section of P&D 55 mile program. I used this program 3 years ago in prep for a crack at 3:30 qualifier for Boston. I never got to the start line as I was not able at the time for this program. This section of the program starts to introduce PMP runs, Planned Marathon Pace runs. I have an issue with Planned Marathon Pace, it most likely is never your true current Marathon Pace. If your Marathon Pace is faster than you are only running at the high end of your Aerobic Threshold and not gaining any real benefit. When you Marathon Pace is slower than PMP then you are doing a long LT training session while it does have a benefit it ends up been a harder session which ultimately may cause an injury or worse still end up overtraining. I tend to do these type of runs at what I feel my actual Marathon Pace is at the time not what I would like it to be. So how do you determine your Marathon pace, that opens up another can of worms altogether, as I have wrote about before this depending on what online calculator/resources you use, it can vary by close to ten minutes or 20 seconds/mile. Having come across this article on Runners World (yes I know not the best source for material) I decided to give it a shot and run it blind. So my first session was 15 Miles with 12 at Marathon Pace. I ran a 5 mile loop which is reasonably flat with the exception of One mile which is undulating. Put on the Polar and Heart Rate monitor and covered over with the sleeve of my body armor. One feature of the polar is you can bring the watch to the chest strap and it will record a lap which I took every 3 miles. Two mile warm up and off I went to try and judge a pace that was not slack but one I felt I could maintain for the duration of a Marathon. The first segments went rather easily and I felt I may have gone a bit too fast from miles 3 to 6. Mile 6 to 9 things where a bit harder but still very manageable. The last Three where tough mentally but the legs where still flying around. On finishing I felt that I may have overcooked miles 3 to 6 which may have made the last three miles that bit tougher and probably slower. Well the results shown below where in stark contrast.

Miles	Time	Average HR	Pace
1-3	0:24:01.1	151	08:00.4
3-6	0:24:06.2	158	08:02.1
6-9	0:23:57.3	157	07:59.1
9-12	0:23:56.9	161	07:59.0

Turns out mile 3-6 felt easy because it was the slowest and the last 3 felt the hardest as they were the fastest. The real surprise is that if I was pacing in a race using my GPS watch and constantly looking at it to make sure I was on target I would have been extremely happy to have hit those splits. The HR readings were about right for my Marathon Pace if not a little on the soft side. My final PMP session is this weekend and I will again run it blind just to see if it was a fluke or not.