Who Won?

A brief update before starting today’s post: if you’ve been following the whole Hood to Coast DVD subplot recently, but didn’t stick around to see all of the comments on last weekend’s post, I should let you know that the movie’s director left a comment on that page, and he seems like a pretty stand-up guy. He apologized for the misunderstanding around the giveaway, explained how he’s in the midst of delicate negotiations with the distribution company (a point he elaborated on in a separate e-mail to me), and offered up a free DVD for one of my readers after the official video release.

In other words, we’re cool. And if the giveaway offer ever materializes, I think the only fair thing for me to do is go back through the original review post and pick the winner from that list of commenters – so if you were one of them, all hope’s not lost quite yet.

I’ll post further updates as I get them – but for now, let’s resume our regularly scheduled programming …

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Imagine this: you’re in the closing miles of a half-marathon, and fairly certain that your time will be fast enough to earn you an age group award. Suddenly you’re passed during mile 12 by someone you suspect is in your age group, and the battle is waged.

You crank your “effort dial” up to 11 as you fight to stay within striking distance of your opponent – and when you’re finally closing in on the finish line, you muster a furious sprint to edge past him, ultimately crossing the line a few strides ahead. At the awards ceremony, you feel rewarded by your effort and look forward to claiming your much-deserved prize …

… only to discover that the other guy beat you by two seconds.

That was my friend Mike’s experience at last fall’s Big Sur Half Marathon, and it inspired our most recent Monterey Herald column. The award discrepancy was due to chip timing: Mike’s rival had passed the start line a few seconds behind him, so when they were racing neck and neck, the other guy actually held a few second cushion that was unbeknownst to both of them.

The whole thing reminded us of some other instances of confusion – one of them coincidentally involving Mike again – when it comes to determining the winner of road races, which seems like an inherently simple thing to do. And this is the part where I normally say that you can read about it in the column that follows below – but today I’m flipping the script a bit. Instead of including the article here, I’m linking to it on our dedicated Running Life webpage.

If you’re wondering about the rationale for this … well, you see, I’ve got this book I’m selling. I may have mentioned it before. It’s available from Amazon.com (also in digital form on Kindle), but the book is actually cheaper from our independent book page, which happens to be our newspaper archive as well. You can also write instructions such as special handling or inscription requests if you order from our dedicated page.

So go check out the Monterey Herald article, and stick around to take a gander at our book. And don’t worry, I won’t force a hard sell on you too often … but I figure a gentle reminder every now and then can’t hurt.

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