What Should You Trust After the Race: the Official Time or the Clock?
You just finished a 5K, but your watch says you ran 3.22 miles, not 3.1. Was it really a 5K? Or maybe you finished the half marathon in 2:02:10, but your watch says 1:59:59. Can you tell your friends that you ran in less than two hours? I’ll give my verdict on these scenarios, but first we need to talk about how race distances are measured and calculated.
What is the difference between shooting time, chip time and viewing time?
Before we continue, I want to make sure we all understand the different ways to measure time in a race.
Firing time
Shooting time is the time from the start of the race (often signaled by the starting pistol, hence the “pistol”) until crossing the finish line. This is also sometimes called clock time .
If you’re really trying to win a race, you might have to take care of your shooting timing. Sometimes the rules state that the winner of the race is the one who crosses the finish line first, regardless of when he crossed the starting line. If you are an elite athlete aiming to win a major race, you will typically make arrangements with the race organizer to be at the actual starting line when the race starts so that the shooting times accurately reflect how long it will take. took you to participate in the race.
But for the rest of us, shooting time doesn’t matter at all. If you’re the 5,000th person behind the start line in a big marathon, it’ll be a good couple of minutes from the starting gun before you can actually get to the start line.
Most of us can just completely forget about shooting times. This is not for us. The exception is if you are competing in a very small local race that does not use chip timing or that only has one mat at the finish (no mat at the start).
Chip time
Chip time , also sometimes called net time , is the time from the time you personally cross the start line to the time you personally cross the finish line.
This is precisely because of the scenario I mentioned above, where there is a crowd at the starting line. If you’re running a marathon in a big city, you may have to wait 10 minutes or more and then slowly move along with the crowd before you can cross the starting line. In this case, your marathon might have a shoot time of 4:40:00 and a chip time of 4:30:00.
The “chip” in the name refers to the computer chip that is usually built into your racing bib (the numbers you attach to your shirt). The timing system records a data point whenever you cross a timing mat on the ground. There is a timing mat at the start of the race and another one at the end of the race. (For longer races such as marathons and half marathons, timing mats may also be installed at some checkpoints along the route, such as the halfway point.)
Watching time
Watch time is the name I use here to refer to the time you see on your wristwatch or running app after the fact. If you start and end the timer exactly when the start and finish lines cross, and never pause it in between, it should theoretically match the time of the chip. But I will discuss some problems with this assumption below.
Chip time matters
As I mentioned above, shooting times only matter if you are trying to win an award in a race that uses shooting times for awards, or if you are trying to qualify for the Olympics .
Use chip time every time you tell someone what you ran or when you track your personal bests (PB). (Only use watch time if you ran a race without fiscal time, and even then be sure to use the actual total time between the start and finish lines. In this case, you don’t trust the clock for fiscal time; you just use it to estimate the missing chip time.)
The watch time should match the chip time if you started and stopped the clock at the start and finish line. But often this is not the case. Some of the reasons why the watch time may be incorrect:
-
Your watch is automatically paused . This is a handy setup for training runs if you frequently stop to drink water or wait to cross the street. Your watch will pause your run when you stop and resume recording when you start moving again. But during the race, stops are not free! If you stop and spend two minutes in a porta-potty, that will still be part of your race time.
-
Your app (eg Strava) may report “moving” time . The idea is the same as above, but this happens even if your watch recorded it all. For example, during a long run I went on earlier this week, I remember stopping to tie my shoe. Strava shows this run at 1:17:02. But if I scroll through the numbers it gives, I also see the elapsed time is 1:17:28. I think it took me 26 seconds to tie the shoelace.
On Strava, you can first display your elapsed time by selecting Edit Activity and then changing the run type to Race. If I do this during yesterday’s shoe tying run, the time elapsed with an additional 26 seconds will show up in this Strava activity.
There’s another reason why your official race result may not be meaningful, even if it’s a chip time and it shows the same as the elapsed time on your watch: Every once in a while, the race organizer gets it wrong.
I once competed in a 2 km (1.2 mile) race and expected my finishing time to be somewhere between nine and ten minutes. My watch registered a number in that range, but I knew it was probably off by a few seconds. When I checked the official results shortly after crossing the finish line, my time was about three minutes faster than I expected! And in this case, I started close to the start line (it was a small local race), so I couldn’t blame it on the time difference between pistol and chip. It turns out that the timing service accidentally added three minutes to everyone’s time. However, they noticed the error quite quickly and my official time was soon updated to 9:29. (I received my age group medal that day and wrote my time on the back so I remember it all these years later.)
So if your official race result is off , consider speaking to the race organizer. There may have been a bug that affects everyone, or they may only have shooting time and not chip time.
Your watch shows longer than the actual race distance.
There’s another consideration here: not just the time on your watch, but also the distance . You may find that your watch’s time is a few seconds behind your chip’s, but the distance seems wrong—usually too much.
The first thing to check is whether the racetrack is certified. (Most are.) The race course certification process ensures that the course is measured at the correct distance. And that distance is almost guaranteed to be shorter than most runners actually run. So yes, you will probably run a little over 3.1 miles in a 5K race!
You can read USATF course certification guidelines here . Of particular interest is this part: “The race course is determined by the shortest possible route that a runner can take without being disqualified. A given runner may not follow the shortest possible route… [t]he actual path of any given runner is irrelevant. The shortest possible route is a reasonably well-defined and unambiguous route that ensures that all runners complete at least the specified race distance.” (Emphasis is theirs.)
How to find the shortest path? “You can think of the shortest possible route as a rope stretched tightly along the route so that it passes within 30 cm (one foot) of all corners, straight through S-curves and diagonally between corners when crossing streets. You must measure a course following the same route as this hypothetical string.” Additionally, a 0.1% correction factor is added to the measured distance to ensure that “your course will not be short, even if you make small mistakes in following the shortest route.”
The only time your smartwatch’s distance reading should make you question the distance measurement is if your watch thinks you’ve covered a shorter distance than the stated run length. In this case, check the map to make sure the GPS route is similar to the route you actually ran. If your GPS accuracy is poor, your watch (or phone) may draw a line cutting a corner you didn’t actually cut.
If your map looks correct but the course is still short, it’s worth checking with other runners to see if they’ve also had a short course. Errors in course measurements or signage are rare, but they do happen! This year, the San Francisco Marathon accidentally shortened the half-marathon distance by half a mile . If you think your race distance was short, please contact the race organizer.
What counts as my PB?
Your PB, or personal best, can be whatever you want it to be. But if you want to show off your time or compare it to other runners, you might want to talk about chip times.
This is where the problem of distance arises. You may have finished your first 5K in 30:03 chip time, but your watch congratulated you on your 5K PR of 28:59. What does it give? Check the distance and you’ll see that your total race distance was 3.22 miles, with 28:59 being the time it took you to reach 3.1 (at this point the finish line was already in sight, but you’re actually still did not finish the distance). race).
This is why we differentiate racing PBs from training PBs . The course’s timing is more accurate and its certified distance is more accurate than your GPS, even though the actual route you personally take may be slightly longer than the certified distance. People tend to achieve PBs at races because that’s when you’re best prepared for a big effort and have the crowd cheering you on. But a potentially longer distance than stated means that running a “5K” race in a certain time is more of an achievement than running exactly five kilometers in that time.
So when another runner asks your 5K time, they mean the race. You can proudly and accurately indicate the time of the chip – in our example, 30:03. But you can also add, “My best training PB for this distance is 28:59, so I know I’ll officially break 30 minutes soon.” You will. I believe in you.