Cal international

The irony is that Avocado ran in the 70's and 80' on notoriously short courses.

Here's a discussion from the Canadian equivalent of LetsRun:

http://can.milesplit.com/discussion/topics/80814

The warmest in five years. In the high 40s, low 50s at start, cloudy with wet streets. Sun came out about half hour into it and then clouds came up about 3 hours into it. High temp probably 55.

sicky wrote:

How was the weather?

jane you ignorant slut wrote:

I'd be interested in confirmation of that on the IAAF, since it's contrary to what was suggested above.

The course profiles are what they are.

I will try to find the official ruling, but yes CIM can NOT be used for IAAF meets like WC or the Olympics. So if you qualify for the Trials at CIM, you better run another sub 2:19 (and be top 3) to make the team.

CIM has a race time bias of -25.9 seconds amongst elites. And that bias is probably due moreso to the nature of the course than due to fierce/deep competition, like the even more aided ~London/Berlin/Amsterdam/Rotterdam. Chicago is -0.1 and Boston +13.5.

http://www.arrs.net/TB_Mara.htm

Of course, Letsrun fails to mention we had an American run 2:14:07 for 5th in a relatively strong field. Why not mention this performance? If Cabada or Josh 'Jesus' Cox were to run this they surely would have mentioned it? Come on' Wejo, get your act together.

Jogger to be wrote:

I will try to find the official ruling, but yes CIM can NOT be used for IAAF meets like WC or the Olympics. So if you qualify for the Trials at CIM, you better run another sub 2:19 (and be top 3) to make the team.

Looking for this?

great run by wykesy!

great guy, good to see a good result after many years of hard work.

Lekuta wrote:

The irony is that Avocado ran in the 70's and 80' on notoriously short courses.

For those who care, you should probably add a footnote that you're just making that up. (In the vernacular, you're lying.) In fact, I didn't run any marathons until the 1980s and 1990s, and I'm not aware of any that were ever found to be short. (Two, however, were downhill and aided, including Boston, which -- contrary to what most people here believe -- can be an absurdly fast course, if only because of the strong tailwinds in some years. As I mentioned earlier, I don't object to running on downhill courses or courses of uncertain length; I simply object to inappropriate comparisons of times run on such courses and times on record-quality courses of specified distances.)

But I'm glad you raised the matter of short courses. As I mentioned, many people in the U.S. running community have very strong negative views about short courses -- the term you used was "notoriously short" -- yet have no qualms about claiming "PRs" on courses that, by international standards, are equally unfit for such claims. In this regard, I was amused by the reaction of participants in a half-marathon in Austin several years ago when they discovered that the course was short. Yes, the course was shorter than the advertised distance, but it was also ridiculously downhill, which effectively shortened the duration of the race by (as I recall) something close to what the shortfall in distance did. The participants were unbothered by the prospect of making fraudulent claims of PRs on a screamingly downhill course -- in fact, that prospect probably attracted many of them to the race -- but were really upset by the prospect of making fraudulent claims of PRs on a course that was merely shorter in distance.

Um, yeah wrote:

Jogger to be wrote:

I will try to find the official ruling, but yes CIM can NOT be used for IAAF meets like WC or the Olympics. So if you qualify for the Trials at CIM, you better run another sub 2:19 (and be top 3) to make the team.

Looking for this?

http://www.iaaf.org/mm/document/competitions/competition/05/69/17/20100930080110_httppostedfile_daeguwchqualifyingmarathoncompetitionsin2010_22438.pdf

Thank you. It wasn't my suggestion that CIM was on the list, just that it wouldn't make sense (from an objective comparison) if Boston was. The fact that Boston is on the list doesn't create an objective justification for the difference in treatment.

There was a prior thread in which I produced the course profiles for Boston and CIM. Can't find it on a search but will see if I can dig them out again.

Jesus wept, you are like an annoying little Jack Russell with a bone. let it go.

Marathons are run on roads, over uneven terrain and are quite often point to point races. The earth is NOT flat. A loss of 340 feet over 26.2 miles is inconsequential.

Not all of us can live in Kansas (where the earth is flat) and put on races that are perfect in every way.

Bayarean wrote:

Marathons are run on roads, over uneven terrain and are quite often point to point races. The earth is NOT flat. A loss of 340 feet over 26.2 miles is inconsequential.

Not all of us can live in Kansas (where the earth is flat) and put on races that are perfect in every way.

However, this race made the decision to finish considerably below where it started. Is it still a race? Hell yes. Did everyone race over the same course? Hell yes. It however. dropped too much to be accepted by IAAF.

No, mother earth made the decision to put Sacramento 340 feet below Folsom. That same celestial being also decided to make the prevailing wind blow out of the west into the runners faces the whole way.

If the organizers of CIM were on the hunt for a screaming fast downhill course and this is the best they could do, they did a piss poor job.

Huh. Mother Earth is the race director of CIM? That is crazy talk.

That list only has 34 marathons in the US. Why, when there are hundreds of certified courses? I think we could come up with plenty that are not listed but are not point to point, don't have consistent tailwinds, etc. Here are a few not listed: Honolulu, New Orleans Mardi Gras, Austin, San Diego RNR, Long Beach, Richmond.

The reality is that they chose only a few marathons and probably not for the reasons you think.

If we survey all the people who have responded on this thread saying CIM isn't that aided, I wonder if we'd find that all of them set their PR at CIM?

(For the record I don't think it's that crazy fast of a course, compared to St. George or some other nonsense. Just curious)

Good one.....again wrote:

Bayarean wrote:

Marathons are run on roads, over uneven terrain and are quite often point to point races. The earth is NOT flat. A loss of 340 feet over 26.2 miles is inconsequential.

Not all of us can live in Kansas (where the earth is flat) and put on races that are perfect in every way.

However, this race made the decision to finish considerably below where it started. Is it still a race? Hell yes. Did everyone race over the same course? Hell yes. It however. dropped too much to be accepted by IAAF.

That would be all well and good except that the drop from Hopkinton to finish is greater than the drop from Folsom to finish (yet Boston is on the IAAF list):

As for "Short List"'s comment about other races left off the list, sure, I have no disagreement with that. I'm just not accepting that Boston is more legit than CIM based on course profile.

edumacator wrote:

If we survey all the people who have responded on this thread saying CIM isn't that aided, I wonder if we'd find that all of them set their PR at CIM?

Meet director says 25% of the people set their PBs at CIM:

Meet director says 25% of the people set their PBs at CIM:

http://coachjoeenglish.wordpress.com/2007/11/27/interview-california-international-marathon-race-director-jim-mansoor/

This is actually quite meaningless without knowing how many prior marathons the typical participant has run.

For instance, if the typical participant has run one prior marathon, and we further assume that the meet director really means "conditioned on having run a marathon before (thus excluding first-timers) 25% of participants set a PR" - 25% would be much *lower* than expected if Cal was a marathon of average difficulty. In fact, we would expect that a full 50% of participants with one prior marathon experience should PR on that course.

Conversely, if the typical participant has run 10 prior marathons, 25% would be much *higher* than the fraction expected if Cal was a marathon of average difficulty. In this case, we would simply expect that 10% of participants would have their PR on that course if Cal was a marathon of average difficulty.

Of course, this discounts the fact that marathoners generally tend to improve their performances over time (which would thus "boost" the PR rate of any marathon over the random expectation).

The statistic is not even very comparable across events. For instance, the Boston marathon has been extensively discussed in this thread as a marathon with a large net downhill. Thus, one might like to compare the PR rate at Cal to the PR rate at Boston. Of course, this would inappropriate since the average experience level of Boston marathoners is likely to be considerably higher (due to qualifying standards) than is the average experience level at Cal.

The statement that "25% of participants PR on our course" thus strikes me as a seemingly impressive statistic that is being used to promote a race - but is actually totally uninformative in isolation with regard to the difficulty of the course.