Going the Distance?

Recently I opted to skip a race that my local club had targeted and descended upon en masse. Based on the results, it looked as though had I gone I’d have had a pretty good chance of walking away with the Fastest Old Fart medal, though there’s certainly no assurance of what coulda’ woulda’ shoulda’ happened. But I let it slip away, c’est la vie. Sure, it was cold as hell that day, but that’s not what held me back. As one of my club-mates put it a few days later, I took a principled stand and chose to give this one a pass. Go ahead, call me an elitist, I can take it. 

Let’s come at this from another angle. Those of you outside the New England running community who actually read these essays (which, if you drew a Venn diagram of said audience would result in an infinitesimally small intersection) probably don’t know of a regional magazine – yes, old school real-live printed on dead trees – called New England Runner. It’s a labor of love by the folks who drive it, and seriously, subscribe. Send them a few bucks. They deserve it.

In this month’s edition of said venerable publication, the also venerable Dave McGillivray, he of Boston Marathon and many other sources of fame, posted a column discussing the accuracy, or lack thereof, of GPS measurements of race courses. His article is of high merit; most of his points entirely accurate, though some I would dispute a bit technically because I’m an OCD geek. Only a few really raise the eyebrows, like suggesting that a runner missed the start or finish lines by fifty feet (five feet, sure, but fifty?... seems unlikely, but remember this). But the merit of his arguments aside, he focused on the GPS aspect and didn’t address a key point: a lot of race course are short or long because a lot of race directors just don’t care or don’t know they should care. 

Let me counter the previous statement by saying that a lot of runners just don’t care, either. And not caring is their right, and you may rightly and happily place yourself among that crowd. I don’t. 

What’s the purpose of racing? If your point is to prove you can run a distance, I’ll give you that close enough is probably close enough. Your office mates who have a hard time getting across the parking lot hear “half marathon” and don’t care if it was a tenth of a mile short (frankly, they probably don’t know what length it should be to begin with). If your point is to have a fun outing to run with your friends, again I’ll give you that close enough is probably close enough, though I would hazard you can do that for free (so long as you don’t need Yet Another Cheap Sweatshirt or various other swag) pretty much every day of the week or with your club or local buds. But I hold, in perhaps what you might interpret as a snobbish tone, that neither of those are racing. if your purpose is to race, by which I mean you care about your performance, which means you need to measure your performance, then a race director that doesn’t care is, quite frankly, ripping you off. 

Don’t get me wrong. There are plenty of reasons to show up at an event, the most common non-truly-racing one being that you want to support the cause that the event is being run for. If that’s your gig, fork over some coin to fight E. Harvey Thripshaw’s Disease while going for a run, once again, that’s your right. I’ve done it gladly (well, not for Thripshaw’s Disease, but you get the idea). But notice I used the word ‘event’ here, not ‘race’. When asked to come to a ‘race’ that’s not a race, where I am at best lukewarm to the cause (not saying it’s not worthy, but there are more worthy causes than any one human can ever support), my reaction is decidedly tepid.

I recently partook in an event, and in this case I clearly call it an event, because I wasn’t racing. I was pacing, meaning that I didn’t shell out any cash – my volunteering was enough to score the Cheap Sweatshirt and post-race banana. It also meant that I didn’t care about my time other than bringing home my fellow paced runners within a minute of their target, while distracting them from their exertions with lurid and obscure stories. Such a task should have been fun and easy, since we pacers only pace at paces where we are not stressed. Fun it was. Easy was a little more of a challenge since the course was not only almost certainly short, but because only five of the thirteen miles came in within two percent of their advertised one-mile distance. 

Wait a minute, you doth protest, two percent? Aren’t you being at the very least persnickety, bordering on curmudgeonly, and edging well past nit-picking? Answer? No, I’m not. 

First, let’s hop back to Mr. McGillivray’s statement that you might have missed the start or finish line by fifty feet. I found that almost laughable, but let’s presume it’s plausible. Fifty feet is only one percent of a mile. Two percent is a hundred feet. So yeah, two percent is a lot. 

Second, when you’re pacing runners for an hour-fifty half marathon, two percent is ten seconds per mile. Our job is to bring our sheep home within a minute of, but never a second over, our pace time. Being off by ten seconds a mile over thirteen miles makes that kind of tricky. But hey, that’s our job, right? And besides, two percent is probably within the margin of error of the GPS watch, even having been extremely careful in pegging the splits exactly at the mile markers. 

Trouble is, that two percent error range applied to only five of the thirteen miles. The other eight ranged up to six and seven percent, swinging wildly from long to short. Now you’re up to, and occasionally exceeding, three hundred feet and thirty seconds off in a single mile. 

After this roller coaster of inaccuracy, which made it tricky for me and my fellow pacer to agree on how to compensate, it was no surprise when the finish rolled near with my watch reading notably short – whereas, here I am in full agreement with Mr. McGillivray, said watches will usually read long. And that short measurement included some weaving and dancing in the last half mile to coach people in and make sure I didn’t cross the line too soon. 

Yah sure, I hear you say, these things happen. But those folks paid for a half marathon. Many of them probably wanted to better their performance from previous half marathons they’ve run. How can they do that when their course was likely a minute shorter than a real half marathon? They have not gotten what they paid for. 

Certainly plenty went home happy to have run something close to a half, happy with their intentionally cheesy Christmas-themed swag, and utterly thrilled that they had the chance to witness the vendor tent near the finish line offering artisanal IVs in any flavor including cherry (yes, this happened, and yes, I looked it up, and yes, it terrifies me as it should you, and no, that wasn’t the race director’s fault, though I did make up the part about cherry). But had I paid for and raced that ‘event’, I would have been bewildered at best. 

Then this happened. The post-race survey. Now, kudus for even asking for input, since many races don’t, but this one made crystal clear, if it hadn’t been before, that this was a consumer event, not a race. For the question, “What motivated you to register?” there appeared six options plus “Other”, and not one of those six made any allusion to the concept of a race. It’s a tradition, it’s a bucket list (I hope they meant a half-marathon, not this particular event), to get fit, to recover from illness, just to say I did it, and, of course, for fun. Nothing wrong with any of those. But don’t you think that a race survey should have the option of saying, “To achieve a time or performance or place goal”? 

Who cares if the course isn’t accurate if you’re not really holding a race? 

I’m staying away from the fact that this event was put on by a for-profit event promotion company, because to be fair, I’ve partaken in some of said company’s events that were in fact quite well done. And because, as the conclusion of this story will show, this problem is not limited to or tied to that for-profit situation. I’m also leaving names out to protect those you may view as guilty. 

Remember that principled stance? The race I took a pass on? That one was a local 5K raising money for a good cause.  I checked the web site and noticed it said it was USATF sanctioned, which, since I have a little background knowledge here, I can tell you means essentially the organizers had obtained liability insurance through USA Track & Field. A good thing, to be sure. But if they knew enough about USATF to utilize their sanctioning service, certainly they must also know that the real prize is a USATF course certification. A USATF certified course has been measured by accepted standards and can be assumed to be accurate. Huge. (I note there was no other language on their site indicating ‘wheel measured’ or any other nod to having paid attention to whether their 5K was 5K.) 

So I wrote the race director and politely asked that since I noticed they were sanctioned, were they also certified? Frankly, I expected the answer to be no, because certification isn’t a trivial exercise. And had it been, I would have accepted that answer; after all, it's a local 5K fundraiser.  But I was taken aback by the actual answer, which was no, but was followed by, and I quote, “Out of curiosity, why do you ask?” 

Parse that. We’re running a race and we have no idea that there is value in showing our course is accurate. 

It’s one thing to get to a race and discover the course accuracy leaves something to be desired, but when you know up front that the organizers haven’t made it a priority… well, as the airlines like to say, we know you have other choices, so in this case, yeah, other choices. 

Reports from friends who ran the event indicated that the course was pretty close. How close? Who knows? Meanwhile, I penned a polite response to the race director, reproduced below, and took the principled stand. I can’t say that I’ve always taken this stand in the past, nor can I say that I’ll always do so in the future – chances are good that I’ll let many imperfect races into my plans; it’s a case-by-case decision because as I said, there are lots of reasons you might participate on any given day. But it’s always your choice where you spend your time, effort, and dollars, and if you truly want to race, you’re on solid ground if you insist that the folks putting on the event are in fact holding not an entertainment event, not a fund-raiser, but indeed a race. 

Thanks for the response. Course certification assures an accurately measured course and is a HUGE asset for any race. Without it, no time can be relied on to be valid for any purpose, whether personal, club, or any other sort of record.

There are far too many races where “close enough” is the approach. “Close enough” is simply not close enough. I don’t mean to sound elitist, but as a moderately competitive 20-year veteran, if I’m going to pay for a race I want to know I can count on accuracy and validity for personal and other comparisons.

Thanks