Is it possible to have a chip time 30 minutes slower than the clock time in a large marathon

Typical Person wrote:

I saw this result for the Philly marathon

http://resultsarchive.active.com/pages/oneResult.jsp?pID=138723688&rsID=137367

This woman's chip time was 3:52 but her clock time was 3:20. How does this happen?

Splits 1:45 for the half at age 62. Yeah right.

Back to your question: Philly has (at least last year when I was running it) a "rolling wave start". So wave 1 would go off and wave 2 would be held back until the roads are clear. 2-3 minutes or so. Then the same with wave 3, maybe a bit longer. So, technically, I think it would be possible.

Anyway, a 62 yo woman doesn't split 1:45 for the half.

Maybe she gave her bib to someone else (daughter?) and she had to work her way through the crowds because of the bad corral assignment?

I ran Philly yesterday and am listed as finishing in the mid 40s place for my age group.

Having been trained by the Kip Litton hunt, within about 30 seconds I found three suspect times listed ahead of me due to odd gun/net differences. They probably are mostly just timing errors and not people people trying to Kip, but with the same error rate (3/40) applied to the field of approx 11,000 finishers that means about 800 errors. Seems high to me for a good timing system, but I have no experience as an RD.

I hope they go through the results and try to correct them.

i think that sounds about right. the results were not correct all of yesterday. i ran the marathon and was first listed finishing about 20 places back from where i finished then listed as running a half marathon. it just now has looks correct to me

I don't know about this specific situation in Philly, but I know of at least one mid-major marathon and half marathon (15,000-20,0000 combined runners) with a concurrent start with no waves that takes just about 20 minutes for all the runners to clear the line.

I would imagine, then, at some larger races, that a half hour wouldn't be a stretch. At Bloomsday (a 12k), for instance, the winners and many competitive runners have finished before the last waves have even begun!

But this is the opposite of that. Her gun time was faster than her chip time. If she took a half hour to get to the start her chip time would be faster than her gun time.

Not An Expert wrote:

I don't know about this specific situation in Philly, but I know of at least one mid-major marathon and half marathon (15,000-20,0000 combined runners) with a concurrent start with no waves that takes just about 20 minutes for all the runners to clear the line.

I would imagine, then, at some larger races, that a half hour wouldn't be a stretch. At Bloomsday (a 12k), for instance, the winners and many competitive runners have finished before the last waves have even begun!

Typical Person wrote:

I saw this result for the Philly marathon

http://resultsarchive.active.com/pages/oneResult.jsp?pID=138723688&rsID=137367

This woman's chip time was 3:52 but her clock time was 3:20. How does this happen?

Wait, what? This makes absolutely no sense at all. It's not physically possible for a chip time to be slower than a gun time. Now, if it was the other way around, that can definitely happen. One way is a race with multiple starts like Boston, a runner could have a wave 1 bib and start in wave 2. Another way is at a race that doesn't take the start mats down right away, if someone shows up late to start. We had that happen at our race a couple years ago, a guy showed up 40 minutes after the start so he ended up with a funny result line, something like chip time 4:15 gun time 4:55.

Philly is notorious for posting wrong results. For the number of runners they have it's probably a pretty low percentage, but every year they have more than a few that stand out. I notice the result link posted has now been removed.

I can't wait until all you chip/gun detectives start really going through Philly's results. Year after year, this race probably has the most examples of cheating; people who do a 2+ hour first half then a sub 60 minute second half.

d2xccoach wrote:

It's not physically possible for a chip time to be slower than a gun time. Now, if it was the other way around, that can definitely happen.

I can see why you have made it all the way to the D2 coaching level. Thanks for adding these unknown facts to the discussion.