Can whoever "Jim" is, please have the courtesy of identify yourself with a last name and running club affiliation, so you don't get confused with us "other Jims" who didn't write the note.

Thanks,

Jim Gulla
President Sandown Rogue Runners

Edited by author 12-09-2008 03:58 PM
Jim,

What volunteer work are you going to be doing for next year's Mill Cities Relay? Perhaps you can handle the timing all by yourself, freeing up Dave and the rest of the volunteers so that they can run the race themselves?

I have timed the race several times for Yankee Timing and it is the single most complicated race to time I have ever worked --- and I have timed at least 500 races in the past 7 years. Changing timing companies, using chips, or summoning a voodoo priestess would not speed up the process for a number of reasons:

1 - Unlike most races, the organizers and clubs involved do not want the overall team winners to be known until the award ceremony. They do not post the results until AFTER the overall team champions have been announced. Even if we had the results 30 minutes earlier, we would not have posted them.

2 - Given the fact that there have been several ties (that needed tie-breakers calculated) over the years and that even the last place team can score points for their club, we can't even calculate the winning teams until the very last team has crossed the line.

3 - Every year we are informed of changes to teams AFTER the team has finished that need to be edited in the scoring program before we can calculate the winning teams.

4 - Every year we have at least one team that has bent the rules in some way and gets DQ'd from the overall scoring. The race committee meets quickly to decide on these, but then their decision has to be edited in the scoring program before we can calculate the winning teams. (The DQs are not caused by teams trying to cheat, but are instead caused by injuries, car accidents, etc. As a matter of fact they are usually reported by DQ'd team themselves.)

Michael Amarello
Yankee Timing

P.S. I expect to see a sincere apoligy from you --- with your full name attached --- on this forum soon and look forward to your volunteering to work at the finish line for next year's event!!!

Jim, I trust you did find ALL the results on Cool Running yesterday AM. This is a complicated event to score, with many variables coming into play. The last thing the committee would want to do is award the trophy and then find out later that some qliche in the scoring resulted in us having to re-award it to another team, NOW that would be bad.

In the mean time I trust you enjoyed your day. I know our club provides FREE entry. Now think about that. For FREE, you get a well manged course, miles marked, FREE FOOD, a giveaway, band, DJ. If you are Patriot fan you got to see the New York football Giants get creamed by the Eagles Just a whole lot of FUN!

I believe it was around 1:15 when we started the awards ceremony. We had planned it to be 1:00, not too bad.

Not everything "runs" according to plan. The most inportant thing is to get the results out accurately, and that I believe we did.

Dave LaBrode
Benevolent Ruler
Andover Striders

Edited by author 12-08-2008 07:13 PM
Jim- Said <<< It's hard to believe that after 25 years of running this race it still takes forever to tally the scores.

Could be you are joking but the bad wrap that timing companies regularly get when the problems are almost entirely caused by other sources is a sore point with me, so I'll assume you are serious.

Of the things that happen to delay results, what percentage in your considered and informed opinion do think are attributable to the skills of the timing company?

And what percentage do you think are the result of the volunteers who write down incorrect numbers or team captains who change team category designation without telling the scoring people or who try to pull a fast one by bending the rules.

There was one delay that happened that I'm aware of. They did not want to consider the results correct without checking out things that seemed odd.

Dave Camire had to take time to search through 2 floors of people to find me to ask why my team had no recorded finish time. He could have just blindly taken the data as fed to him (or not fed to him in this case) but he, like most of the timing companies, does not want the results to be incorrect. I told him that since my other team members were in the car that hit a pole in Hudson they never got to the Sunshine start. Fortunately no one was hurt.

I did not bother to tell him that we didn't start as I had other things on my mind. Thankfully for the event, Dave was doing his best to find and fix all issues that were not his causing.