Skip to main content

Reply to "USATF certification of off-road course"

I am with Jay and Bob on this.

I recently measured a 5K/10K XC course that is 90% on a well-defined and well-bordered path. The grass surface was mowed as close as a golf course fairway and the ground was dry and firm when I measured. Where the course route traverses an open area, I identified this segment as a straight line connector between two readily definable inflection points. I steel-taped an 800 foot section in an open grassy area here and I rode it a few times to see if I was off. There was no variation. The race went off without incident of any kind. I have great confidence that this course is accurate, and that it will be easy to "re-create" the exact route for next year.

I measured another 5K in a park where the route necessarily traversed several open areas. Only about a third of the distance was on a single-track path. This course required a huge amount of work to define the path, measure the path from fixed objects, show the direction between fixed objects, and document all this. The most work of all was creating all the map insets to illustrate the route with all these additional measurements. Having said all this, I believe this exact course can readily be recreated from all this data and the map insets next year.

For me, the bottom line to certifying off-road courses mostly comes down to whether my client is willing to pay me for the additional work - for me, about double the time for a comparable road course in the two examples above. The other big consideration for me is the condition of the surface on which I am measuring. If it is soggy or muddy, if the grass is long, if there are lots of steep hills, stream crossings, small rocks and roots and such, I believe I would want to calibrate on local surface that re-creates the course conditions as closely as possible. It seems to me that for any stream or gully that is "jump-able" by anyone, the tape measure should be used to record the straight-line SPR over the obstacle. I would guess this is what is normally done in any off-road measurement. Am I right?
×
×
×
×