A Brief History of Martha's Vineyard Course Measurement

When a runner pays for entry to a race the he or she expects is naturally expecting the race to be the advertised distance, not a meter more or a meter less than the distance they planned to run. While a race being long is frustrating, and quite possibly ego deflating but it is generally not a tragedy. When a course is found to be short through re-measurement however it is quite a lot more than a mere frustration, take the recent very public example of The Great Scottish Run which was found to be 149.7 meters short. In that instance 9,500 runners, many of whom set massive PR's now have to go back and scratch out a major personal achievement, and on a more public note Callum Hawkins who ostensibly broke the Scottish national record on the course is now no longer the national record holder, never mind that his run would likely have still been a record had he gone the extra distance, the fact that the course was short invalidates it all the same.

I've been thinking a lot about course measurement in recent days, and not only because of so many recent measurement snafus such as the one in Scotland, in fact most of my interest has been centered on races much closer to home such as the Martha's Vineyard 20 Miler, Scoops 5k, or the Murdick's Fudge 5 Miler... none of which are currently USATF certified or have been accurately measured recently. In addition to looking at the other races located on the island I find myself in the position of being a co-RD for the first time and have been looking into the specifics of course certification for the race I'm currently in the process of organizing with the Hurricanes Youth Cross Country Running Club. More my my own experience measure a race course later.

Looking into the specifics of course certification got me thinking about the history of certification on the island and which races had been certified, when, and by whom. Looking through the old course maps was something of an interesting experience and told a story of it's own. Below are the pictures I found and some explanation of each race's significance and the peculiarities of it's course.

The first course we'll look at is the only certification course I could find for Martha's Vineyard and one which expired long ago. It was measured by a Bill Brown of Vineyard Haven (Tisbury), MA and appears to have been measured as part of the effort to certify the Marianne's 5 Mile Run the Chop Race, which is now the Murdick's Run the Chop Challenge. The course is a standard 1000' (304.8m) bicycle calibration course and was presumably the certification course used for Bill Brown's other measurements around the island.

It seems logical to next look at the Marianne's 5 Mile Run the Chop (again now the Murdick's Run the Chop Challenge) course which Bill Brown also measured and certified and was presumably the purpose of his calibration course being measured and certified itself. This course map is in my opinion a great example of free hand course map and quite reminiscent of that era in running. It is in fact refreshing to see a map that is done entirely by hand and features Bill's own handwriting throughout. The insets are particularly nice in my view and my favorite parts of the map.

Yet another course certified by Bill Brown and another example of a simple hand drawn map. This course like the Marianne's 5 Miler course is still regularly used and has not been changed since it's original measurement. Sadly like the Run the Chop race this course is no longer certified due to the age of the original certification and the fact that it has not been remeasured since that time. 

    

Our final course by Bill Brown is the Scoops 5k course which comes some short time after the Hospital 5k map, one will note the certification numbers of MA99001RN for the Hospital 5k and MA99002RN for the Scoops 5k. This course if of particular interest to me as a runner because the layout depicted in the map is not the layout currently used for this race, and it appears from GPS and other data that the course as now used is significantly longer than the stated distance of 5k; in fact when running the course distances of 3.2-3.25 miles have been reported by other runners.

I found this final map to be of significant interest because this is the only map I found that was not currently used for an race. The date the course was certified is uncertain from the map and USATF entry, however the map shows the finish line as being near the Hot Tin Roof, and establishment which changed hands and names at least a decade ago if not more. For me the most interesting things about this map was the level of professionalism relative to the other maps, for one the inset if typed and the street names etc are also typed out. While I doubt my own maps will look this professional when I begin to measure courses I will likely use this map as a template of how to do things the right way.

Hopefully this article has been a good overview of what courses have been measured on the island and how they were initially measured. I'm planning to do some of my own course measuring over the coming months and will post more about those courses and the measurement process as they come up.