SHOULD ALL RACES HAVE TIME- RELATED START PENS?
YES‘At every race. I’m not elite by any means but it’s so frustrating for everyone, when slower runners start further up than they should. It’s not a question of hierarchy, or a sign that faster runners are more important than less speedy ones – it’s just common sense. You’d like to think that most people could be trusted to get themselves to the right spot on the start line according to their ability, but in my experience this is not the case. Either they’ve no sense or etiquette but either way you spend a lot of your time in the opening miles zigzagging around people, which uses up energy. If you’ve trained for a PB and you’re on a knife-edge in terms of whether you’ll achieve it, this could be the difference between doing it or not. Sometimes you see people around and in front of you set off at a pace that you just know they cannot sustain, and sure enough after a mile or two they’ve slowed right down. If you want to walk, go and start at the back. I think that it would be an easy solution to make it a rule that every race has to organise the runners. They don’t have to be big fancy pens like in the larger races – a few strips of tape will do. Or even if they just make an announcement on the tannoy pre-race for runners to think about the best place to line up. Anything that would help an event start more smoothly.’
NO‘It would be a waste of time in all except the really big city races with thousands of runners. I think most people can get themselves in the right spot using a bit of common sense. And people can cheat the pen system if they want to anyway. Even the big races have different ideas about this. For example, the Yorkshire Marathon has start pens but the Manchester Marathon does not; it just has ‘suggested areas’ but nothing is enforced.
‘If a race has fewer than a thousand runners there’s no need, and I think it would ruin the atmosphere. I do smaller local races with my mates to have fun. I wouldn’t want the formality. Even if everyone got in the correct pen, they’d be doing so based on a finshing time they put down on a form months previously, and unless they’re a highly experienced runner who runs an even pace and has trained properly, they are going to do either a positive or negative split which is going to affect things anyway. Start pens are really based on the pace that everyone is going to be going in the first mile. Maybe they should change it to ‘first mile pace pens’. I think a better solution would be to make chip timing compulsory. That way, any runners thinking about sneaking further up might relax knowing that whatever time they cross the line doesn’t matter anyway. Timing chips are cheap and easy to use.’