Ever Wonder About Race Course Certification?
At the 2010 Bele Chere 5k I made the final turn onto Charlotte Street for the home stretch. I knew from running this version of the race course in previous years that the finish line would be in plain sight just a few hundred yards down the street.
It wasn’t there. I couldn’t see it. We ran all the way back to McCormick Field before encountering the finish line, making the race a few hundred yards longer than previous years. What gives?
Course certification. That’s right, if you’ve been running a race for a few years and then the course gets certified, it will most likely be longer than the course you ran before. That was also the case with the Hot Chocolate 10k we just ran on January 22, 2011.
David Lee of Lee Timing (they certified the Hot Chocolate 10k this year and managed the timing) shared some information and an interesting article about course certification. I heard some of this after exploring course certification following the Bele Chere race too. In plain terms, certification assumes that the runner is cutting every turn as tightly as possible, wasting virtually no steps from start to finish. That’s difficult to do when you’re running with hundreds or thousands of other runners — we’re always adding some steps swinging around people, passing, weaving in and out. It’s probably only physically possible to run exactly the certified distance if you’re all alone or at the head of the pack (or the back of the pack).
A certified course will always err on the side of being a little long. In fact there is a little cushion added to a certified course. So if there’s a race that you’ve run in the past and you learn that it’s being certified for the first time, be prepared. It’s most likely going to be longer.
Read the full article here, which also includes interesting stuff about the idiosyncrasies of GPS devices (and why they’re not used for certification).
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Dennis, this was probably discussed in all cars returning home after Saturday’s race, especially if they ran the race in previous years. My Garmin showed it a little long as well. However, as a race director who has had a course certified, I developed my own conclusion about Saturday’s distance. The key MAY have been that the absolute shortest/closest distance was measured around curves and turns. Then…as we followed instructions of course officials, most people stayed to the right. With some turns this was the “long” way around. To run the shortest distance, we would have been going all over the road, in the left lane, right lane, etc… Of course someone would have said, “they are cheating,” and the police and course officials would have been ticked, etc… As a runner, I try to cut the corners of certified courses without cutting across in front of runners or oncoming traffic, which usually means staying to the right of the yellow line, even though the course was probably measured to the tightest closest corner. I always like your emails and info. Keep it up. Like you, the .20 of our last 6.20 really sucked. I wish that part could be cut out with some extra distance down near the river. However, course certification costs and I doubt that will happen just to make it easier for us. I will be right there again next year, gutting it out up that beast.
Great question, Ken. The short answer is that almost any course can be certified; the more pertinent question is whether or not a course will pass an audit in the event someone sets a record on it and a claim for recognition of that record is submitted to USATF.
Let me first address the question of measurability. Steep, technical courses pose real challenges to the course measurer. Rocks, roots, gravel, and debris can affect the rotation of the front wheel of the bike, which means that the rotation of the front wheel — and the Jones meter — can be altered as the course measurement is conducted. Every time the front wheel loses contact with (or slides on) the course surface the accuracy of the measurement suffers. USATF requires at least two measurements, which must agree with one another within a tolerance of 0.08% — or 8 meters over a 10,000 meter course. If measurements 1 and 2 yield a difference of greater than 8 meters, the course measurer must go back out and measure the course again, until at least two measurements fall within 8 meters of one another.
Sometimes it’s not possible to get there. What happens if the course has sections which simply cannot be ridden on a bike (or cannot be ridden exactly the same way twice)? When this happens, the measurer has to pull out a steel tape measure and physically measure the section(s) that can’t be ridden, following the shortest possible route that can be run over that section. (Yes, USATF says the tape measure has to be a steel tape measure; nylon or plastic tape measures can stretch, yielding inaccurate [i.e. long] measurements.)
So much for the measuring part. What’s this about an audit, you may ask?
USATF course certificates are good for 10 years. That is, they’re good for 10 years as long as the course remains completely unchanged for ten years. You can count on a road course remaining the same as long as the local jurisdiction or DOT don’t come in and change an intersection, add or remove a traffic island, or block a road altogether. Technical courses through the woods, for example, are changing from the second the original course measurement is complete: trees and underbrush continue to grow; soil along a trail is eroded; new, and slightly different paths are cut as countless runners, hikers, mountain bikers, and 4-wheelers travel the course over time. It’s quite possible (likely, even) that a technical course can change significantly over just a few years’ time, resulting in a change in the overall length of the course.
If someone runs what appears to be a new record on your course, USATF will send out an official to remeasure the course and verify that the course is at least as long as the advertised distance. If the course, as it was run the day a record is claimed to have been set, is ultimately found short the record claim will be nullified and the course certificate will be revoked.
One way around this is to go with a single-year certificate. USATF does recognize that some courses are subject to change from year to year and will issue a certificate that is good for one race. A good example of this would be a cross-country race where all of the landmarks (start, splits, and finish) could be virtually impossible to find from one year to the next. I measured a course outside the Bristol Motor Speedway in Tennessee this past December which was issued a one-year certificate because the course was defined by thousands of poles with Christmas lights on them that were placed temporarily around the Speedway itself. The likelihood that the poles and lights would be placed in EXACTLY the same place next year is about zero, so USATF issued a certificate that was good for last year only. If the organizers would like the course certified again for 2011, they’ll need to have the course re-measured and re-certified. A one-year certificate costs exactly the same as a 10-year certificate.
I hope this answers your question. I don’t often get to expound on the details of course certification so if you have any other questions you can think of, I’ll be glad to get back to you.
Dennis,
Good topic. This is a subject that we runners wonder about a lot, and tend to opine about, without the benefit of the information in this article.
Question: what about race courses on trails which are very steep and/or technical? Does someone measure those with a bike? Dennis, you’ve been on some wicked trail runs like the Rock 2 R0ck and the Paris Mountain trails. I have to assume that at least SOME of the wicked trail races are certified (there’s even a national championship 10k trail run, right?).
I bet some of them aren’t certified. (-“Dude, I think this trail is about six miles!” –“Solid. We’ve got ourselves a ten kay, bro.”)
On the other hand, I bet some of them are certified. So how are those trail courses measured?
That’s a really good question. I think David Lee will get notified because he commented on this post. I’d love his expertise on this one.
Great topic, Dennis. Thank you for raising it.
If I can add to the conversation at this point, I thought it important to point out that the “cushion” USATF requires is actually called the “short course prevention factor,” which is “intended to result in a course which is at least the stated distance, within the limits of measurement precision. It also helps ensure that (very) slight variations in the course layout on race day won’t invalidate [the course] measurement.” (1)
Very briefly, the “cushion” we’re talking about, or “SCPF,” is equal to 0.1% of the course distance or 1 meter/kilometer. In actual practice, however, the cushion often disappears as the course is measured. That’s why it’s factored in in the first place. The reasoning behind this is that the course measurer, who is almost always riding a bicycle equipped with a variant of the “Jones Counter,” (2) is very likely to “wobble” slightly while measuring the shortest possible distance, resulting in a measurement that is longer than the actual distance between two points. To put this in perspective, let’s say YOU are asked to ride a bicycle along a straight, painted line that is measured –using a steel tape measure — at 1,000 feet. If you come off the line to the left or right at ANY point of your ride, the total distance of your ride would eventually measure out longer than 1,000 feet, because as everyone knows the shortest path between two point is a straight line. USATF puts this fail-safe into its certification process, and assumes the course measurer will wobble to the left and right of the shortest possible path a total of 1 foot for every 1,000 feet measured (1 meter/km, or 5.28 feet/mile), which means that even though the measurer may have recorded 1,001 feet from point A to point B, the true distance was only 1,000 feet. To me, this “fudge factor” is both wise and well-justified, as it helps ensure the course you’re running is as close to possible to the advertised distance.
As for how all of this compares with GPS measurements, I’ll leave it to the article to which you refer in your post. All I can say is that USATF does not allow me to use a GPS device of any kind to measure a course because they’re simply not accurate enough. Period.
Believe it or not, the “gold standard” of course measurement is still the steel measuring tape, and these are only available in lengths of up to 300 feet unless you’re on on unlimited budget. To measure a 10 kilometer course with a 300-foot steel tape measure would require stretching the tape a minimum of 110 times (while factoring in the actual axial pull force on the tape PLUS allowing for expansion of the tape measure itself at increasingly higher ambient temperatures), assuming there are no curves or turnarounds. Can you imagine the time and expense involved in such an exercise?
The bottom line is this: USATF course measurement procedures ensure the certified course you run will be as close as possible to the advertised course distance, and that the next time you run a race on a certified course the distances run on both courses will be within a few feet — if not a few inches — of each other.
How long did the Hot Chocolate 10K measure? Far what it’s worth, I ended with 32,808.4 feet, or 10 kilometers.
(1) USATF Course Measurement and Certification Procedures Manual (online): http://www.usatf.org/events/courses/certification/manual/calibrating.asp
(2) USATF Course Measurement and Certification Procedures Manual (online): http://www.usatf.org/events/courses/certification/manual/equipment.asp
Thanks Dennis. This is great info.
Most interesting. I agree that it’s sort of hard to apex corners in traffic, or when 250 of your closest friends are within 50′ of where you are on the course. That said, the process makes sense from a standardization perspective.
NB: The Garmin oracle reports that I ran 6.35 miles yesterday. Fie.
Hey Dennis… LOL I noticed the same thing at Bele Chere at the 2010 Race… I actually talked to the RD about it…and was told they moved the finish line so that the after finishing walk back to the ballfield did not cross over a busy intersection…. so in other words they were justifying the extension for safety reasons…. But I would agree with you… the course should have been de-certified then…..