Flat Hills Road

If you haven’t already noticed, the Boston Marathon has reached its entry limit and closed (late Friday or early Saturday, it hardly matters which). This is easily two months earlier than the Marathon has ever closed before.

First, hold the panic. There are still “guaranteed” entries floating around out there which were already counted under the entry limit. Those include charity fund-raising entries (e.g. “raise a few thousand dollars for our charity and you can run”) and club entries (the B.A.A. distributes numbers to area clubs in exchange for volunteers on race day, and of course B.A.A. members have their own entry route). If you’re planning to run through the Tufts President’s Marathon Challenge, for example, you probably still have a good shot at standing in a crowd in Hopkinton in April.

Second, though: there are thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of marathoners with qualifying times who didn’t get their entries in. Most of them haven’t even started training yet; Boston is five months away and four months is an average training cycle for a marathon. There are probably several hundreds of runners who expected to qualify for Boston 2010 in the next few weeks, and now it doesn’t really matter if they do. It used to be the case that a fall qualifying marathon would set you up for Boston in the spring, but if this trend continues qualifiers may have to be run as much as a year in advance.

The question is whether this is something which needs to be addressed or not. If the B.A.A. decides that action needs to be taken for future marathons–and they may not–they have a few options, including expanding the field and tightening the standards. (Ironically, it’s the qualifying standards which were put in place to control the field size which led to Boston becoming as popular as it is today.)

Boston faces constraints unlike any other marathon with regard to its field size. The traditional Hopkinton starting line is relatively narrow (particularly as compared to Chicago and New York City, which start on six- or eight-lane roads) and staging even the current thousands of runners through a small town on a Monday morning is a monumental enterprise which strains the bounds of roads and courtesy. Wave starts, which the B.A.A. has been experimenting with to some success in recent years, ease the congestion but prolong the time the course must be kept open to runners (and, consequently, closed to vehicular traffic).

The other route (not mutually exclusive with expanding the field size) would be tightening the qualifying standards, and that seems likely to be a monumentally unpopular move. Already, times are challenging for many runners; Christopher McDougall, in his recent bestseller Born to Run, referred to qualifying for Boston as “something 99.9 percent of all runners will never do.” Chop off five minutes, or ten minutes, across the board, and the B.A.A. would significantly dent the number of qualified athletes.

But that’s not really what they want to do; the B.A.A. is best off with a standard which is challenging but attainable. Tightening the standards might have to come with a lottery-entry system, not unlike New York’s. Many people are surprised to learn that the New York City Marathon has qualifying standards as well, and they’re actually tougher than Boston’s (starting at 2:55 for men under 40) though they do include a half-marathon standard (1:23 for those same under-40 men).

In New York, however, the standards aren’t for entry; they allow the qualified runner to bypass the entry lottery. Boston might wind up as The Race Where You Have To Qualify Just To Enter The Lottery.

Due to my role for this year’s ING NYC Marathon (about which more later) I decided I needed to be able to extract more information from marathon splits as the marathon is actually happening. I remembered that for previous Boston Marathons, David Monti of Race Results Weekly, doing a similar job to what I’m doing, had a fancy-dan Excel spreadsheet to take splits and project times.

While it’s possible that David added some kind of course factor to his spreadsheet, it seems more likely that he did what I did recently: he made projections based on simple math. For example, they’ve reached ten miles in time X, they have sixteen and two-tenths to run. If they run 16.2 at the pace they ran the last mile, they’ll finish in time Y; if they run it at their average pace for the last ten, they’ll finish in time Z.

I did this for mile splits and for 5km splits, which are the numbers I expect to get in New York. I added some conditional formatting to show me if the leaders were speeding up or slowing down, and if they’re ahead or behind course record pace, using colors. (I suppose if I was really a spreadsheet champion I could use varying shades to indicate how far they were from course record pace.) Adding sheets for the wheelchair athletes will also happen before race day.

I had 5km splits for Robert K. Cheruiyot’s Boston Marathon course-record run handy, so I plugged those in and it worked like a champ.

A sheet which would take a finish time and place and calculate prize money with time bonuses would be pretty cool too, I guess, but it’s not quite as algorithmic–it’s more ahead-of-time data entry. New York does have a deep time bonus structure, and the total prize money package will vary widely depending on how fast the pack runs.

If you have any other ideas of useful and/or interesting on-the-fly calculations, take a look at the sheets and let me know what to add. I did the original work in OpenOffice.org Calc, and exported to Excel, so I haven’t tested the Excel version. (Here’s the original .ods version.) You are, of course, welcome to use these yourself during whatever marathon you’re watching; you can see the appropriate cell to change to set the course records.

Last fall, I wrote a piece for New England Runner about the changing face of transponder (aka “chip”) timing, where long-dominant ChampionChip was seeing a new wave of competition from lighter, cheaper, and sometimes “disposable” new technology.

Even since publication, however, the chip world has moved on from the state of last fall. I’m told that ChampionChip is nearly out of the picture (you’ll still see them around, as timing companies which own ChampionChip equipment will keep using it) and the disposable chips are dominating. I haven’t heard if the waste issues raised by the disposables have been addressed, nor do I know if the “holy grail” of chip timing, a transponder which can be embedded in the bib number and worn without any extra work from the runner, is any closer.

With that said, here’s where things stood last September. This is as I submitted it, not as it eventually ran, so there may be errors and issues; bear in mind that “this year” means 2008. Hyperlinks, rather than coming up in the text, are all provided at the end of the story.

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John Powers of the Boston Globe has a pretty good column summing up the American performance in Boston. I don’t always agree with Powers but he nails this one:

For US marathoning, the challenge is not so much to get faster as to get deeper. While podium-level runners like Hall, Goucher, Deena Kastor, Shalane Flanagan, Meb Keflezighi, and Khalid Khannouchi can run with anybody on the planet, you still can fit most of the American contenders inside an airport courtesy van.

Ryan Hall had as good a chance as anyone to win on Monday, and despite post-race criticism of his tactics (unwarranted, I think), the fact remains that only one runner actually had perfect tactics. That’s the definition of a marathon champion, sometimes: the one runner whose strategy worked. The problem is that Ryan only had one roll of the dice. There were five or six guys in the field with a shot at winning, and one of them was American. What if two of them had been? What if we had two Ryan Halls entered? Maybe the one who actually ran still gets third or fourth, and the hypothetical one makes different bets and wins. Diversification isn’t just a good investment strategy.

Amby Burfoot discusses strategy in his blog, and even though Shira Springer disagrees with his analysis of the wind effect, Amby has a point: negative splits are the way to run Boston until someone proves otherwise. (Obviously they didn’t save Kara Goucher, though.) Here’s my challenge, though: the data is there. I’ve played with analyzing it before (albeit without much success). What questions do we ask in order to get some conclusions from that data?

An emailed press release today informed me that the PRRO circuit was “easing its bonus purse eligibility.”

I’m proud of them, I suppose, but I needed to read the whole release to figure out what the original bonus purse eligibility had been.

One of the common themes when carping about distance running’s relatively low profile in the American sports landscape is that Running Needs a Circuit. Or a league, or a tour, or something to compare with NASCAR or the PGA Tour or the NBA. All kinds of formats get proposed, but none of them ever happen, mostly because road races are independent organizations with no real national governance, and none of the formats offer the races much to make up for the degree of autonomy they would have to give up. Beyond that, distance running puts strains on athletes not found in car racing or golf; few runners are capable of racing at a high level for several weekends in a row.

The other reason they never happen is because two road racing circuits already exist, and very few people care.

When I was working at Runner’s World, there was a reader survey done which revealed that more Runner’s World readers claimed to read Running Times as well than Running Times claimed to have readers. This was probably due to sampling error (or, by now, my faulty memory) but it suggested to us that RW and RT had close to total audience duplication. The question was asked, “Should we just buy them and absorb them?” That idea was rejected, finally, because as long as RT existed, but remained relatively small, it was a disincentive for others to enter the running magazine business. After all, RT was trying to compete with RW already; surely there wasn’t much room left in the market, right? (Of course, RW did buy RT less than ten years later, but under different leadership with different ideas.)

This thinking was pretty attractive, but it relies on a leap of logic – that RT not winning significant market share from RW meant that competing in the running-magazine market would be an uphill fight – which isn’t necessarily true. RT’s existence only proved that there was limited room to compete with RW in the way RT was trying to compete. The question to ask of new running magazines was not, “Why do you think there’s a market for a new running magazine,” but “What are you doing which will give you a greater share of the market than RT has?”

So I’m not inclined to dismiss new running circuit ideas out of hand. But I do suggest that reasonable skepticism be applied, specifically this question: Why is this circuit going to be a greater success than the PRRO and USARC put together?

Neither of these circuits is a failure; if they were, they wouldn’t have survived as long as they have. However, they both have limited definitions of success. USARC is run by USATF and is essentially a circuit of national championship road races. As such, it focuses exclusively on American athletes. There is a point system for placing at series races, double points are awarded for the marathon championship, and the athlete with the most points at the end of the circuit wins an extra check, $6,000 in 2008. There are lesser checks for second and third. I’d be surprised to learn that any athlete earned more from the USARC itself than from prize money in the races necessary to win the USARC check, but it’s also worth noting that the athlete’s sponsorship contract may match all these winnings.

The PRRO may have been the incentive for the USARC. If you can think of a big road race, probably in the spring or summer, with a large field and about ten Kenyans in the lead, it’s probably a PRRO race. Boilermaker, Peachtree, Cherry Blossom, and Bloomsday, plus the World’s Best 10K in Puerto Rico, were the PRRO races in 2008. The PRRO offers a “bonus purse” (eligibility for which is the subject of the press release mentioned above) of $35,000, significantly higher than the USARC. However, the PRRO bonus has been won by runners from East Africa so consistently in the last two decades that relatively few people in the USA (probably fewer than a thousand) know or care who won last year. Aside from the size of the prize purse, the major division between the PRRO and USARC is that the former is all-comers, and the latter is for Americans only.

Now that I’ve laid out the pitfalls of the existing systems (which, I should add, work just fine for their own purposes,) we need to ask those who propose new circuits or schemes for team competition: why is this going to be more exciting and more involving than USARC and PRRO?