Self-Timing in National Championship??

Unfortunately this starts at the top with bad role models in the highest reaches of the sport. Cheptegai stopped his watch at the end of his WR run. Luckily there were not any water stops along the course or many of the runners would have been inspired by Jakob to get some hydration.

Cross Country doesn't have FAT timing.

If it's not fully automatic, how do they separate five runners finishing with 3-tenths of a second?

Video

That part I understand. On their website PT Timing says up to 1000 frames per second. But the clock is not started by the gun?

You are incorrect Malmo. Depending on the timing company, many do indeed use FAT timing. Heck, I am a XC coach that sometimes times our home meets and we use FAT timing when timing XC meets. A proper set up will have a chip timing system paired up with a finish lynx camera. The chip system gets the places and times unofficially and then the timer goes through the finish line picture (likely paired with indentiLynx full frame camera) and evaluates the official times and places which will be FAT. I will admit that when I do it, I do not evaluate every place via finish lynx. I leave the chip times unless the chips have runners in the wrong order. In those cases I will evaluate the finish lynx picture to get the places correct.

The clock is indeed started by the gun. The times will be FAT as long as they evaluate the finish lynx picture for the runners. They would for sure evaluate the photo for all close finishes. They would possibly just leave the chip time if the finish is not close. I cannot speak to how each individual timer operates.

A chip time would not be FAT because there is not guarantee as to the exact time the chip read. A time from the finish lynx picture would be FAT.

It's the way of the Strava World now. There once was a time when racing with a watch just wasn't done because you were racing. You had people doing the tming and you concentrated on running as fast as you could from the start to the finish. More and more, people are concerned that it is recorded for Strava so that they can get their pat's on the back for running.

I've watched numerous kids cross the finish line holding their wrist ready to hit the watch instead of pushing past the line because thats whats important to them. Instead of the days when we had running logs for our own private recording, now it's has to be immortalized for all to see on Strava or it doesn't count.

Times be a changing.

big deal

Is there any evidence that stopping the watch actually cost someone a place?

I used to never race with a watch, but seeing heart rate, and exactly when you pushed the pace or fell off is nice information to have looking back.

I’m guessing this is a complete non-issue. Just jealous old people wishing they could have had the tech back in the day.

It's probably more habit than anything else.

0.3 isn't fully automatic. Thats less accurate than a hand-held stop watch or wrist watch.

Especially in a 10k and on that course, you can go through at about 8k pace and feel great. However, you'd die in the last 2k. So, they can help you pace

I don't get why people feel the need to start/stop at the start and finish of the race. You can start your watch during your warmup and stop it after your cooldown and it will still include all your race data. If you really want a separate file for your race, you can just go in after the fact and crop it to when you started moving at the start and when you passed the finish line.

Because if you’re racing you don’t want to look down at your watch, half a mile in, and see 3.5/20 whatever. It’s a lot easier - requires less mental energy which can be used later in the race - to look down and see 0.51/2:23

My company times about 40 XC meets a year so it was awesome to see the level of accuracy required here. The amount of redundancy built into timing NCAAs is extraordinary and PrimeTime is one of the best in the country. Many coaches, myself included for many years, are not sure how the timing works and should learn. I cannot tell you how many kids were passed right at the line this fall so that they could stop their watch and upload to Strava. I always tell coaches to advise their kids that my stopwatch at the finish line costs $30,000 and they should tell their kids to run all of the way through the line before hitting their watch. We timed one significant championship where the outcome was affected by a kid paying more attention to their watch than the finish line this year.

Cross-country at this level (and if you want real accuracy, every level should use this) is timed the same way a track meet would be timed, with FAT (in most cases, FinishLynx) cameras. In this setup, chips are used as a quick way to feed live results and speed up the evaluation process in the FinishLynx software. With the finish line density at NCAAs, there is no chance that the chips would all read in the correct order, which is why each runner has both bib and hip numbers so that you can accurately identify runners in the photo finish image.

In XC, we only report results to the 10th of a second, even though we could report to the 1000th if we wanted to, assuming the timer is using a start sensor, which is what happens (or should happen) at big meets.

Kudos to the timing team this weekend because it is stressful work and the amount of prep that goes into ensuring its right, building in redundancies and getting the data to display in a way that is fan friendly is enormous.

It's just habit. Distance runners start and stop their watch several times per day during training. They also get stats about their run that they won't get from the timing coming, heart rate, strides per minute, etc.

timing *company