Race distances in the NW England too short

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Stevie B May 2016 12:40pm, 13 May 2016 26 posts	0 Stevie B manchestereveningnews.co.uk So it turns out somewhere along the line some one effed up and the race distances of at least a few races were too short. I received an email about it as well giving me an new adjusted time for the 2013 ASICS Greater Manchester Marathon time. So does this mean we accept the adjusted times and change our results for all the effected races or do we change these races to say they're no longer the initial race they were i.e. now there's the Greater Manchester Nearly Marathon and the Stockport 9.872 Mile Road Race? Or do we just all ignore this?
The Teaboy May 2016 12:47pm, 13 May 2016 14,082 posts	0 The Teaboy Perhaps someone measured the distance on a Mercator projection map and failed to account for the difference between the North and South of England?
Chrisull May 2016 12:52pm, 13 May 2016 8,856 posts	0 Chrisull I always said running in the South West was harder... now it turns out that's coz we were actually racing the proper distances!
Wriggling Snake May 2016 12:59pm, 13 May 2016 11,932 posts	0 Wriggling Snake It does explain my decent time at the Trafford 10k......
Metro_Nome May 2016 1:12pm, 13 May 2016 3,279 posts	0 Metro_Nome lots of discussion of this over on the Manchester marathon thread!
Nelly May 2016 1:36pm, 13 May 2016 3,272 posts	0 Nelly As Metro_Nome says, there's been LOTS of discussion about this issue already on this years GMM thread http://www.fetcheveryone.com/viewtopic.php?id=57710 and there was also some interesting posts, especially by Old Croc who is a course measurer, on the separate thread started when we only knew that GMM was short http://www.fetcheveryone.com/forum__58948__1__gps_garmin_accuracy As for your comments; ""accept the adjusted times and change our results"" I think that's a personal decision. Thankfully, although I've now potentially "lost" 9 PBs, none of them are current, so I'm in the "forget about it and move on (as long as processes are changed to ensure it doesn't happen again)" camp. What does annoy me slightly is that there has been no word from English Athletics on this issue. From their website http://www.englandathletics.org/athletes/athlete-registration/your-support:- ""As a sport we need to continue to see key functions fulfilled. Revenue from affiliation and registration fees help enable this. Rankings - including Power of 10 and all that goes into the rankings lists are accurate, for example, course measurement & licensing/permitting of events and officials consistent with rules of the sport"" Given they claim membership is used (partly) to ensure races are measured correctly, if I was affiliated, I'd have expected some sort of a statement from them on this issue by now.
The_Saint May 2016 10:45am, 14 May 2016 5,831 posts	0 The_Saint I understand the methodology used in measuring out the reference distance used to calibrate the Jones counter bike before and after each course measurement but I was discussing this with a club member who is a practising microbiologist in terms of how accurate any measurement can be. After discussing it we thought that the quoted "But the course used to initially calibrate the bike - Middlewood Way in Macclesfield - was found to be short by 0.5pc" Was actually in practice far less than the real-world error that you should expect - in A Level Physics I was taught that you should always assume 5% instrumentation error - so this leads inevitably to the question - just how accurate are courses when all the conceivable means of checking are going to be subject to the same margin of error? Two concepts frequent muddled up are accuracy and precision en.wikipedia.org I wouldn't argue that courses measured with a Jones Counter are not precise.
The_Saint May 2016 10:46am, 14 May 2016 5,832 posts	0 The_Saint "frequently muddled up" that should say
AndyI May 2016 3:51pm, 14 May 2016 23 posts	0 AndyI Saint - I teach practical classes at degree level and I dock marks from (and scowl at) those who dare to guess an error without any supporting information! There's no reason to expect that a distance can't be measured to a very high precision if it's done correctly. The recent observation of gravity waves involved detecting a fractional length change of 1 part in 10^21!