Never mind the official time and distance, what did you really do?

I can't believe there were WALKERS in Grave W's way at the start of the LA marathon!

Grace's report also gives me a shudder with her description of the shoulder-to-shoulder mass of "runners" she had to deal with.

I guess that these walkers and 15-minute milers are now all officially "marathoners". Ah well. I haven't had any walkers, or even strollers to deal with (yet), but in a couple of recent races small children have been pushed to the front row by well-meaning parents, causing fast adult runners to make desperate avoidance manoeuvres for fear of causing them injury.

I'm a bit of a geek when it comes to my race statistics. My race post-mortem starts in the car on the drive home; when I look at my splits and start number-crunching, I almost always end up adjusting my "real" race time to something slightly faster to take account of obstacles like walkers -- or flying shoes and a long course, as in my last race. This is a purely psychological adjustment, of course, but can turn a so-so performance into something that gives me confidence I'm doing OK.

In this way I've turned my 19:20 at the Sharin' O' The Green 5k into an "actual" 18:45.

If you are baulked at the start, like Grace W, was, you can lose significant amounts of time. What I do in those cases is look at my average mile pace for the opening miles when I was free running and adjust the first mile accordingly.

Rarely, I have to ADD time to my "official" time. This has happened with chip-timed races where the official time seems to be way out when compared to my on-board computer time (my trusty Garmin 301).

There was a serious anomaly in the Sharin' O' The Green, when my Garmin split for the first mile read 5:40, but the race timer at the side of the road yelled out 6:12 when I staggered past. I now know this was probably because the organizers added the extra tenth of a mile to the first mile. Huh? Yes, apparently this is a common practice.

My pal Dwight, who knows about these things, tells me: "By the way, when a running course is certified it means that it is guaranteed to be longer than the race distance. First they measure using every tangent even if on race day you can’t run the tangents. Second they add so many feet per mile of the race again to make sure it is at least the race distance. They usually add this extra distance to one of the miles. For the old town half marathon they added the distance to the first mile. That is why you probably got the extra tenth of mile on your Garmin on the last race. That is also why when a course isn’t certified but has been accurately measured will always be faster and shorter than a course that is certified."

Lately, I've been doing more workouts (no races yet) on the track; the experience has given me a new respect for the precision of numbers -- and how useful it is to be able to get slightly more objective measurements in one area of running at least.