So how much running does a ref really do?

In a previous post, I asked that question and had some answers but nothing from real experience. I have played with iPhone apps that monitor your movements but was not 100% convinced because they are hard to get to work when reffing.

My wife got me a New Balance GPS Monitor recently and so I decided to finally put it to good use. I tested it by running what I knew would be a mile and sure enough it registered 1.01 miles, so close enough.

Here is the picture of the watch:

This weekend marks the beginning of the regular soccer season here in the region and as such, I had quite a few matches to test this on. Here is the breakdown of my matches and the totals run:

• U16 Girls center (40 minute halves) - 3.98 miles
• High School Boys JV match (30 minute halves) 2.22 miles
• High School Boys Varsity AR (40 minute halves) 2.24 miles
• U16 girls AR (40 minute halves) - 2.00 miles
• U15 Boys center D1 (40 minute halves) - 4.5 miles

When it is all said and done, that is a lot of running for this weekend. To top it off, I played in an adult league game (and was more tired with that than I have ever been with reffing) as well as reffing the following adult league match, so you can imagine how tired I was this weekend. But still, the pain actually feels good.