We’re talking about mileage again. But this time, it has elicited feelings of despair – and it’s causing an existential crisis.
Health & Injuries 5K series in a local parkway. It’s free. It’s timed by the gun. There are no frills (but there are hot dogs and chips after the race). I love them – the races, not the hot dogs. This year, the organisers tweaked the course to avoid construction work on one of the bridges. I actually prefer the new route to the previous one – it’s shadier and runs more on pavement than slippery gravel.
It’s also shorter by about .02 miles, according to my I gutted it out and my watch clocked 19:51. Elated. (I’d run the course twice before and recorded the same distance both times, so I know that it’s not a tangent thing.)
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When I ran this year’s race in June, I was feeling really good – better than I’d anticipated. I checked my watch considerably in the second half of the final mile and saw that I was going to How Team RW set a world record sort of as a bus. These are the UK’s most popular parkruns!
Every summer, I run a.
Gut-wrenched.
Did I run a 5K in 19:51? Or did I run a 5K in 20:06, which is what the race posted on its results? How did we land on a 20:06 if the course was short? Was this some sort of race director maths?
So, here’s the conundrum: if I didn’t wear a running watch, I wouldn’t question the results, time or distance. It would have been a throwback to my high school cross-country and track days.
But, if I didn’t wear a running watch, I wouldn’t have seen how close I was to completing the race in under 20 minutes – and I definitely wouldn’t have found that extra gear for the last 300m.
Deep down, I know that the official results are what the race posts, not what’s on my watch. (Just take the flip side: if a marathon course measures long – say, 26.32 miles – and I scraped a GPS running watch at the 26.2-mile mark but not through the finish line, we know that I didn’t punch my ticket to Boston.)
At the end of the day, these mileage discrepancies feed into my, well, Type A quirks. I don’t want to say that I ran faster than I did – I just want the course to be accurate. And if it can’t be accurate, I want it to err on the side of slightly longer. You get it.
Next time, I guess that I’ll have to jog around the finish chute or settle for a 19:51 result at a 3.08 mile race. Or run faster.
