Staying on Track

Given the events of the weekend, I thought it might be a good time to talk about race courses and how to stay on them.

It is funny, it doesn't seem like that hard a thing, staying on course during a race, but you might be surprised how often it happens. I know of least 5 occasions that friends of mine have done it, and that isn't even going into all the stories you hear in the media etc. It is a simple thing, but also apparently and easy thing to get wrong. So how to you guarantee that you don't?

Well there are a number of steps you can take, graduating in difficulty.

The first and easiest thing you can do is really study the course maps. Looking at the course maps and relating it to the surrounding area will go a long way to making sure you know where you are going. Try and get an understanding which roads you are going to be on, where the turns are, street names if possible (can be hard in other countries) and if there are any landmarks. It can be surprising how familiar you can become with a course without even seeing it.

If I was going to a place that I was really unfamiliar with I would sometimes look at the course maps in conjunction with Google Maps and Street View (if available). It wasn't quite as good as running over the course myself, but I found it worked pretty well, particularly if I was going to arrive in a place too late to look at the course in person. The added advantage of looking at a place on Google Maps is that you get a feel for what the course is like, is it hilly, are the roads wide or narrow, are the road surfaces good, is there shade on the run, things like that.

If a course was fairly straight forward, or I was quite comfortable with it, sometimes really studying the maps was as far as I would go. If I thought I might need to get more familiar with a course, then I would look do one of the following.

The next thing I would often do to learn a course would be to drive over it once I got to the race. This wasn't always possible due to road restrictions etc, but I would usually try to cover as much as possible. I remember when I did a race in Japan we tried to drive the course in a taxi because it looked really tricky but it was so complicated that we ended up getting lost too much and gave up, so it doesn't always work. If it isn't possible to actually drive the course, organisers sometimes put on a bus tour, which can be just as useful and as I have mentioned we once or twice did it in a taxi. If it looked like a really complicated course then I would usually go with this option, even if it meant driving an entire, single loop 90km bike course. If the race was in Australia and I had access to a car then I nearly always drove the course before race day, I simply had no excuse not too.

The final option I would go with is riding the course, however, I would never do this for an entire bike course before race day. I know some people who would head out and ride an entire 90km loop days before a race, but in my opinion that is too much work too close to race day. I would usually only go out on the bike to check out the course if I was looking at a specific part of the course, or the course was a loop. I remember riding the entire bike course in Iskandar Puteri before race day but that was because it was only a 30km loop. Nice and easy. Heading out on the bike is a great way to check out a run course though. Once again you are unlikely to run an entire run course before a race, but the bike can be a nice easy and quick way to see the entire run course.

Really there are not many excuses for heading off course in a race. The onus is always on the athlete to be familiar with the course and that is way it should be, there are plenty of ways to learn the course and none of them are hard. Most of the time that a person goes of course it is entirely avoidable. Often people assume that the course markings will be obvious or that there will be people to follow, and that will do you for 90% of your races, but it is surprisingly easy to hit a point where you are all alone and you find yourself unsure of which way to go. particularly in smaller races. At times like this you will be thankful for the extra bit of time you spent learning which way to go.