When you run, do you follow the road and its turns and corners and sharp lefts? Or do you try to always run straight, point to point and get to the end in the shortest way possible?  What do you do?

Measuring Race Courses

When race directors hire a professional to measure their courses, they want the course to be exactly 5K, 10K, or whatever the distance is supposed to be.  I have watched a few courses get measured, and the person usually uses a bicycle and a GPS.  She or he then rides the projected course and cuts all the angles on the turns, taking the shortest way along the route (unless otherwise directed for some reason).  However, we were the only ones on the course, perhaps 3 bicycles on an open roadway.  Throw in 100+ people and suddenly the roadway is not so easy to smoothly run through.  Then people at the end of the race look at their GPS and say “why was the race 10.2 miles instead of 10?”.  Did they cut the corners and run the vectors correctly?

Running on the Track

This week there were 2 instances of people not running efficiently around the track.  On Monday a junior runner on our local track team was running the mile at a home meet.  She stayed right on the girl in 1st place for almost 3 laps….but on the outside of lane 1, at times in lane 2.  When the other girl started kicking it in, our girl had nothing left.  She also ran a 1680, not a 1600 as lane 2 is longer than lane 1.  Just this morning at the track workout I host, the same thing happened.  We were doing sets of 200m-200m-400m and on every 400m, 1 runner would line up in lane 4 and run almost the whole lap in lane 2.  I told her at least twice to cut in.  Needless to say, she ran way more than a 400m!

Be Smart, Cut Corners….

Next time you are on the track, stay as close to the inside lane as possible to save time and space.  In your races or any run, look ahead of you and run straight to that spot, assuming you are being safe while doing so.  Look at this week’s picture – it sums it all up in 1 place.

Happy Running

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