10 years? 20 years?
10 years? 20 years?
Liability, and the lawyers that feed on it, are transforming the competitive scene.
I ran many road races in hot weather, including the national-championship marathon. Those were hard, but if people were doing those races at all, they were generally pretty fit and able to handle the conditions.
That has changed. Most road races are now "happenings" or "events," rather than competitive opportunities, and are largely peopled by healthy but not truly race-fit individuals. Race organizers accept that--even *encourage* that--but it means that they also have to accept a greater responsibility for the participants' health and safety.
One factor to keep in mind is that, BITD, virtually every marathon finisher came in somewhere under four hours--and most were well under, even in brutal conditions. Nowadays you have "runners" who are out there for five, six, and seven hours. That's a long time for a person to be at (or close to) his/her "max" effort, and on hot days increases the danger of heat stress significantly.
If I were a marathon director facing the possibility of warm weather, I might require entrants to copy, by hand, a statement acknowledging that if they did not reach the first 10km after, say, an hour; 20km after two hours; 30km after 3:10; and 35km after 3:50, they would not be permitted to continue. (I'm just pulling times out of the air, but those are probably in the ballpark.)
present, esq. wrote:
If I were a marathon director facing the possibility of warm weather, I might require entrants to copy, by hand, a statement acknowledging that if they did not reach the first 10km after, say, an hour; 20km after two hours; 30km after 3:10; and 35km after 3:50, they would not be permitted to continue. (I'm just pulling times out of the air, but those are probably in the ballpark.)
This may be well-intended, but it may have the opposite affect by encouraging slower runners to exceed their "max" effort in hot conditions to avoid being kicked off the course.