Vertical wave starts ?

Pacing Mule

This is a new one on me - granted I am not overly experienced in races but this doesn't make much sense to me.

There is a 10k on in the phoenix park this Sunday organised by FIT magazine. Rather than doing traditional what I would call horizontal wave starts based on expected finishing time this Sunday entrants are being asked to line up in either a running or jogging lane - basically Runners to the left and Joggers to the right along the course.

To make it more interesting the organisers are resisting any attempts to define what is running or jogging too and leaving that up to the individual to decide but that's a different debate altogether :P

Does this approach to wave starting make any sense ? To my mind categorising in only 2 sections may not be enough but then after that you're looking at two very different speeds going shoulder to shoulder together right at the start. But as I say I'm inexperienced and perhaps I'm missing something that has worked before ?

TRR

Sounds odd all right. Maybe, both starts are cordoned off and can't mix until after a few 100 metres or so!

Pacing Mule

Actually thinking further about this and it might make very good sense after all. If done right what it could do is allow the trigger happy to get off from the start slower runners to tick the box of being up at the front, queuing,whatever it is that drives people to go to the front and cause delay to faster runners behind. By the time they merge those who would have been slowed down are gone. There may be an argument for 3 or 4 lanes if wide enough not to cause congestion by narrowing the available road space. Will be interesting to see how it goes tomorrow but I do suspect the lack of clarification about what is a jogger / runner won't help.

drquirky

Pacing Mule wrote: »

If done right .

Here is the catch PM- people already make enough of a mess of fairly easy to understand standard pace waves in some of these larger events- throw "lanes" in the mix and you have a recipe for carnage.