Hmmmmmmmmmm wrote:...As for the no timing issue...do you really think that 90% of the people doing local 5/10Ks care or even know what their time is? No.
To my surprise, I think you would be wrong about that. I direct a New Years Day 5k. Generally we produce races that we try to keep on the serious/competitive side of the sport, but our New Years 5k is the one we produce that we have always tried to promote as our one-and-only "all comers" race. By that I mean we allow you to run with your dog, push your baby jogger, and we encourage you to run in costume. I'm happy to get runners who want to run fast, but it's New Years Day and given the way training cycles work (or should work) January 1 is probably not where I'd target to run my best race of the year.
This race has grown from under 250 to almost 1000 in 6 years. We don't give performance awards (well, not your traditional age group setup, we only give awards to the male and female winners and male and female masters winners). We've always timed it with a pulltag system but at 1000 (plus cold hands, this is Vermont), we can't do a good job with manual timing any more. Normally I'd just add more chutes to handle the volume, but we are finishing on a 1-lane road and don't have the option of adding width at the chutes.
After last year's race I surveyed our entrants asking if timing/results mattered to them at this race and if so what direction should we take:
1) Bring in a company to do chip timing at an added cost to entrants.
2) Go to an "open" finish line...no timing just a big clock to see your finish time.
3) Do a "modified open" finish line with times/results for the first 250+/- finishers, then when our chutes back up steer all additional finishers to an open finish area with the big clock.
I figured option 3 would be the most popular, because I thought the slower runners didn't care as much about their times and that option would still get us times for the faster runners. We got over 200 responses and over 50% said go to chip timing. I got a lot of passionate responses from beginners or slower runners that an open finish line was not attractive to them. Surprising to me, what I would call the "better runners" (finished in sub 7:00 pace) were most interested in going to an open finish line and keeping the entry cost down.