Course Certification: FIre Rd. A Calibration Course

As many of you may know the Martha's Vineyard Hurricanes XC Club is hosting the Pinkletink Pace 5k road race April 29th to benefit both our organization and the First Hugs Orphanage in China (where one of our runners spent his early life). One of the goals in putting on this races (aside from raising charitable funds), was to provide a truly competitive environment for all runners, as well as to provide an accurate and enjoyable race course, and the best way to achieve those aims is of course to have the race course USATF certified.

Having a race certified is not as easy a thing as one might think, after all USATF certification means that time run on the course are IAAF record eligible, and as such courses need to be accurate to within fractions of meter. This high level or resolution cannot be achieved by simply driving your car around a race course and referencing your odometer, or even by using a sophisticated GPS watch. Race course which are USATF certified are measured by calibration of a bicycle and complex system of checks which ensure that the course CANNOT be short. All of this precision is of course laborious and extremely time consuming, however for those who care a great deal about the validity of race results it is a very worthwhile endeavor.  

The first step in certifying a course is the laying out of a calibration course. Courses are a straight line steel tape measured course which is corrected for thermal expansion or contraction of the tape and which are laid out on a paved surface. For our course Reaan and I chose the perfectly straight road behind the Martha's Vineyard High School (Fire Rd. A) and measured out a 1000' calibration course along the road. Unfortunately for us it's winter so laying out the course, and measuring it twice turned into a frigid exercise is misery, but in the end the course was measured and we had the first step in the journey to certification completed!