in: RLShadow; RLShadow > 2008-06-07;
| # Posted 2008-06-08 02:07:08 | |
| L-Jackson: | I don't run as many road/trail races as you - so I haven't paid much attention to my GPS read-outs vs advertised lengths. But it appears that a lot of the races you write reports for are underlength based on the GPS. I have felt pretty confident about the distances from my Forerunner so I am wondering if this is really a trend or just a fluke? |
| # Posted 2008-06-08 02:38:48 | |
| RLShadow: | Seems to be a trend to me!! Like you, I have a lot of confidence in what the Forerunner says for distance, so I do believe these courses are short.
I don't know if it's intentional or not; probably more just careless, although it is interesting that the errors all seem to be that the distances are over-stated from what they really are. I think part of it is that in trail races, especially on hilly and/or muddy courses, the pace per mile is practically meaningless, compared to what someone might be used to running on roads. So having an accurate trail course isn't as important as having an accurate road course, where someone could reliably compare his or her time between one 5K and another 5K, for example. With trail races, about the only valid comparison is from year to year on the same course, whether the courses were accurately measured or not. Still, since it's relatively easy to get a pretty decent measure of the distance just by running it with a Forerunner, it seems pretty sloppy to be so far off in the distances. And in today's race, for example, it was obvious, without even having a Forerunner, that the second loop was shorter than the first, because there was a significant section at the start that just wasn't included in the second loop. So to state that there were two 4.5 mile loops -- well, that was totally ludicrous. |
| # Posted 2008-06-08 08:31:16 | |
| RLShadow: | One additional note -- On courses that are known to be fairly accurate, the Forerunner gives very close to the "right" distance. For example, on the Finger Lakes Fifties 25K trail course last year (certified distance), the Forerunner was within a tenth of a mile of the stated distance. And in road races, it also agrees very closely with the stated distance. More indication that the Forerunner does give fairly reliable distance measurements, and therefore that some of these trail races are in fact quite short. |
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