Ultrarunning Ireland

Enduro

For those of you interested in Ultrarunning, Ultrarunning Ireland (The national governing body) has launched its new website at http://ultrarunningireland.com/. There is a wide variety of information on the site, with the main concentration being on Irish international ultrarunning.

GoHardOrGoHome

Not directly related to the new website but is the Celtic 100k going to take place next year or was it a once off?

Second question: to get IAU validation I presume the race organisers would have to pay for the measurement. Is a Jones-counter used for road ultras? How are trail ultras measured? Having read LeCheile's report on how tricky it was to measure a 5k course I can only imagine how difficult it would be to measure a 100 mile course!
(Just curious as to the Connemara 100 mile event next week)

It's great to see such great performances from Irish athletes. It's not as if there's a framework for developing ultra runners from their 20s to their peak in their 40s and 50s. Were all our high performing ultra runners just lucky to stumble upon ultra running and find out they were really good at it?

RacoonQueen

Was just looking at that the other day actually. I see some of our very own boardies are name dropped on it too. Good to see the site is up and running now.

Enduro

GoHardOrGoHome wrote: »

Not directly related to the new website but is the Celtic 100k going to take place next year or was it a once off?

Second question: to get IAU validation I presume the race organisers would have to pay for the measurement. Is a Jones-counter used for road ultras? How are trail ultras measured? Having read LeCheile's report on how tricky it was to measure a 5k course I can only imagine how difficult it would be to measure a 100 mile course!
(Just curious as to the Connemara 100 mile event next week)

It's great to see such great performances from Irish athletes. It's not as if there's a framework for developing ultra runners from their 20s to their peak in their 40s and 50s. Were all our high performing ultra runners just lucky to stumble upon ultra running and find out they were really good at it?

Taking those in sequence....

From what I hear there will more than likely be another celtic 100k next year. Hopefully there will also be a 24 hour (yay!) and 100 mile race as well. All of those should be IAU certified.

Yes, the race organisers would have to pay to be certified, as ever. Yup, A jones counter is used for certification of the distance of road races (In the celtic 100k this year I think the measurer was also the race referee, so he was able to doubly ensure that the course followed the specified route. I heard some interesting tales of measuring the course while the road was still open to traffic You'll notice that generally road ultras are lots of loops on short laps. This keeps things easier for ensuring the accuracy of the distances.

I'm not sure how trail ultras are measured. They're generally not standard distance events anyway. Once they're accurate to within a few km I'm not that bothered about it myself. They're generally about the course rather than the distance anyway, and records tend to be course specific. I know that for the Wicklow Ultra (organised by IMRA these days) the distance was re-estimated once people started measuring the course with GPS watches. From my own POV I just used the distances as guidelines. Terraine and height variation are massive variables that hugely affect the degree of difficulty, unlike the vast majority of road ultras. I presume that trail ultras can't count for general distance records, as they're not officially Jones counter measuered (as far as I know). Not that its likely that anyone would be setting distance records on trail races.

I don't know how the connemara 100 is measured. I'm sure Mick or one of the other Athenry posters here should be able to answer that. What I do know is that it doesn't have UI/IAU validation, or an AI permit, so it won't count for official record purposes.

You're right...there is no official framework for developing ultrarunners, and there is definitely no funding for doing so! So I think it would be fair to say that there was a lot of luck/circumstance involved in getting the current generation of high level ultrarunners into the sport. To a large extent Ultrarunners tend to be self driven and operate outside of the kind of support structures and systems that high level athletes at shorter distances can take advantage of. There is a fantastic level of co-operation and mutual support within the Irish ultrarunning community though. Without that support there is no way I would have been able to get the results I've had in recent times. There was a lot more than luck involved there.

jeffontour

Connemara 100 measurement is as below.

For measurement, the “Calibrated Bicycle Method“ will be used.
Note: To prevent the course from being found to be short on future re-measurement, a “short course prevention factor" is being built in when laying out the course. For bicycle measurements this factor is 0.1%.

Google at will!

Hard Worker

jeffontour wrote: »

Connemara 100 measurement is as below.

For measurement, the “Calibrated Bicycle Method“ will be used.
Note: To prevent the course from being found to be short on future re-measurement, a “short course prevention factor" is being built in when laying out the course. For bicycle measurements this factor is 0.1%.

Google at will!

That's standard practise. All courses are measured 1 metre per kilometre long so that the course is "at least" 42,195 metres in the case of a marathon.
Also, the course measurer should travel in the lead car on race day to ensure that the course he measured is in fact the one that is run.
Disappointed to see that the Connemara 100 didn't receive an AAI permit as the website says that one was applied for.

hunnymonster

from the organisers

Course Measurement, Insurance & Permits
We investigated in detail the possibility of running the race as an AAI permitted race and ran into some technical issues. Because of the nature of the route we're running - for the course to be measured to full IAAF specifications we were advised that the measurement process would need a team of between six to eight official measurers and take up to four days for all the minute detail of the highly stringent process to be followed. This is because we're running over a single 100 mile loop rather than, say, 50 x 2 miles or 10 x 10 mile loops and the single loop is much, much more difficult to measure to the full standard. What we've done is to have the route measured by an AAI trained measurer using the usual 'Jones Counter' and calibrated bicycle method. We're completely satisfied that the result of this measurement process gives us an accurate course and we're happy to stand over that measurement in all circumstances. The measurer, as with all other routes that are measured, builds in a short-course-prevention factor into their calculations and so course is most likely marginally long, by 0.1%. This is the usual practice from a local road race to the Olympic marathon. The practical difficulties presented by the nature of the route make it's measurement to full IAAF standards extremely difficult and for most practical purposes impossible. Having said that, the course is accurate and we will be going to great lengths to apply all of the other IAAF rules and regulations on the day.


The event is fully insured.