Imagine running a world record time in a race, only to discover it’s not legit.
It happened to Kiwi Allison Roe when she famously won the New York Marathon in 1981. But the course was found to be 150 metres short and her world-record time couldn’t be added to the record books.
More recently, Scottish running star Eilish McColgan had her European 10km road record times invalidated when it was discovered the course had not been laid out correctly. And in October last year, Peru’s Kimberly Garcia thought she’d broken the world record in the women’s 20km walk before learning her race time would be annulled through measuring problems.
The exacting and largely unseen work of course measurement is undertaken here in New Zealand by a pool of just five volunteers – one of whom is former Kiwi marathon champion Gabby O’Rourke.
After competing internationally for 20 years, including the world marathon and half-marathon champs, O’Rourke knows better than most just how important course measurement is to distance running.
In fact, it was her frustration at the absence of certified courses in New Zealand that led to the introduction of course measurement here.
“I was actually the first person in New Zealand to push for Athletics New Zealand to get courses measured,” she says. “In 1992, when I started running marathons, I wanted to go to world champs, but there weren’t any certified courses here. You had to travel overseas to qualify.”
As a result, the first New Zealand course measurers learnt the craft and gained certification. Now, decades on, O’Rourke has joined their ranks – recently qualifying as a World Athletics-AIMS B grade course measurer.
The marathon courses in Rotorua, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin are among those O’Rourke has meticulously measured. As a distance runner, even she was surprised by how detailed and rigorous course measurement work is.
“When I was an athlete, I didn’t realise what went into it,” she says. “I just thought you cruised around a course on a bike. But the detail you need to go through…I mean you can’t just ride around the corner; you have to scoot around the corner 30 centimetres from the edge. Nothing is left to chance.”
The almost artisanal process, which takes two days for a marathon, begins with the course measurer laying out a 300+m calibration course on a straight, flat stretch of road. They then ride the calibration course four times (to calculate a constant) on a bike fitted with a Jones Counter – a small cube-shaped contraption that clicks off around 11,000 wheel revolutions per kilometre.
Next, the course measurer rides the full racecourse, taking two measures for each section and establishing interim kilometre markers. Afterwards, the Jones Counter is recalibrated to take into account changes such as temperature or tyre pressure, before a return to update the course where necessary.
While measuring courses, O’Rourke and her colleagues sometimes find themselves in unorthodox situations.
“People look at us strangely when we repeatedly pedal back and forward along the same stretch of road,” she says. “Or they’re unhappy because you’re riding on the footpath. But you have to measure exactly where the course is.”
One time, while measuring the Rotorua Marathon, O’Rourke had to ride a section of a state highway. She set off at 4.30am, assuming the road would be suitably deserted, but had to contend with logging trucks whooshing by.
One of her more unique experiences was measuring the Runway5 course – a 5km run spanning the Rotorua Airport runway – for an event staged during the marathon weekend.
“We were given a 45-minute timeframe to measure the runway in between flights. But an unscheduled emergency hospital plane needed to land, so we had to hotfoot it off the runway,” O’Rourke laughs.
While the mathematical side of course measurement always came easily to O’Rourke – she’s also a maths teacher at Scots College in Wellington – the comprehensive documentation required by World Athletics took her longer to master during her five years of training.
“The detail required is such that anyone can take your maps and data and know exactly where the course goes and where any turns are,” she says. “It’s been a lot of hard work and I’ve had to use my own resources. But now I’m reaping the rewards, going to races and really enjoying reconnecting with the running community.”
O’Rourke says her course measurement work enriches her life. It’s a far cry from the dark days she endured nine years ago when her athletic career was unexpectedly and dramatically curtailed.
O’Rouke was out running along Wellington’s Oriental Bay with her friend Ryan Teahan when she suffered a cardiac arrest. Teahan, who by excellent fortune is a cardiac nurse, performed CPR on her for eight minutes.
“I came to in the ambulance,” she says. “If it had happened the weekend before when I was training on my own at Paraparaumu, I probably wouldn’t be here,” she says.
While grateful to be alive – “I bought Ryan a pair of racing flats to say thank you” – O’Rourke was devastated to learn her running career was over.
“I was told I wasn’t allowed to run, let alone race,” she says. “ That was really tough. They later realised, for my mental health, it was better that I did run.
“My heart won’t let me run fast now so I just have to put one foot in front of the other and enjoy it. I just love being outside.”
As well as finding pleasure in both running and measuring courses, O’Rourke gets great satisfaction from knowing she’s helping others and giving back to her sport.
“Last year we had a call from a lady asking for the Dunedin Marathon to be certified because she wanted to qualify for Boston,” O’Rourke says. “So we hot-footed it down there, measured it, and she qualified and ran Boston. It was a buzz to be able to do that for her.”
While elite runners need courses to be certified to obtain ranking points to qualify for pinnacle events, they aren’t the only ones who benefit.
“Course measurement isn’t just important for the top guys breaking records,” O’Rourke explains. “It’s also necessary for general runners trying to compete and get times.
“With the marathon, you’ve got age-groupers trying to run, say, three-and-a-half hours to qualify for Boston or New York, but their time is null and void if a course is found to be short for some reason.”
And in those unfortunate cases when a runner’s time is disallowed, O’Rourke is quick to point out it’s rarely the fault of the course measurer.
“Ninety-nine percent of the time, the people setting up the course haven’t put the markers where the measurers were asked to measure,” she explains.
And she’s got a tip for marathon runners that even she didn’t fully appreciate until she became a course measurer.
“Cut the tangents,” she says. “You run quite a few extra metres in a race if you don’t legitimately cut corners.”
