What is GAP (Grade Adjusted Pace)?

Grade Adjusted Pace (GAP) is what your running pace would have been on flat ground. Running uphill is slower for the same effort; running downhill is faster but not free. GAP corrects for both, so a 6:30/km grind up a climb might be a 5:10/km effort in disguise.

Why does raw pace lie?

Pace only measures ground covered. On a climb, most of your energy goes into lifting yourself against gravity, so the same physiological effort produces a much slower number. On descents the road gives some of that energy back, but your legs spend energy braking, so you do not get the full benefit either. If you judge a hilly run by raw pace, you will conclude you had a bad day every time the route tilts up.

How does Torqa calculate it?

Torqa's GAP is grounded in published research on the energy cost of running on gradients, principally Minetti et al. (2002), with the downhill side tempered to match how real runners actually descend rather than how treadmill physiology says they could. Steep descents return less and less benefit because braking dominates.

Two practical details worth knowing:

• Gradients are smoothed over a rolling window, so a noisy GPS blip does not spike your GAP.
• If the altitude data on a run is too noisy to trust, Torqa suppresses hill adjustments entirely rather than showing you a fiction. On those runs GAP will sit close to raw pace and hill analysis is omitted.

How should I use it?

On hilly or trail runs, read effort from GAP, not raw pace. Compare GAP against your threshold pace to understand how hard a run really was. Torqa also uses GAP to compute your running training load, which feeds the same Fitness model as your rides, and to bucket your time into pace zones.

Flat runs need no adjustment: GAP and raw pace will agree.